Rudolf Sikora

Rudolf Sikora (1946, Žilina, Slovakia) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (1963 – 1969), where he later worked as a professor (1990 – 2004) and continued in his pedagogical activities at the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University in Košice (until 2011). He produced work in various fields of visual art such as painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, action art, objects and installations. Sikora presented a retrospective of his works at the National Gallery in Prague (Against Myself, 2006) and the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava (2008). He lives and works in Bratislava.

He has been one of the most original figures of Slovak visual art since the early 1970s, during the Normalisation period he was active in the unofficial art scene. In the period of “normalization” in former Czechoslovakia, he was active in the unofficial art scene. He emerged from his synthesis of the “new sensibility” and conceptual thinking and later enriched it with post-Modernist inspirations. He was one of the first artists in Europe to deal with the theme of global-civilization and the ecological threat to the world. Sikora built his way of metaphorical thinking on the use of diagrams, texts, exclamation marks, and work with photography or photomontage. He based his cosmological vision on scientific knowledge from the theory of the origin and existence of the universe while creating an original, artistic parallel to science. Through a peculiar sign system of codes, he named the categories of origin (*), motion (→) and extinction (†), symbolizing the endless circulation of cosmic and life renovation. His ongoing social activism systematically reflects the legacy of Russian revolutionary avant-gardes represented in particular by the work of Malevich.