Realita
/1
- Reality
- Realita
- 1968
- white latex, textile on hardboard
- 32,8 x 29 cm
The series “Painting Games” (“Anti-Happening”) from 1967 originated as a record of pouring and dripping white latex paint on hardboard, a record that spelled out a clearly legible intent. Koller’s choice of latex was not incidental. The color’s impersonal nature was perfectly suited to the materialization of simple communicative signs and the denial of pictorial illusion. Another two cycles from 1968, named “Realities and Subject-Objects”, used found and destroyed or defunct objects applied to a white base. These works associate with an extensive series of “Anti-pictures” as well as with Koller’s “Junk Culture” cycle, in which the artist questioned all of the basic features of painting as an artistic medium. “Anti-pictures” are closely tied to reflections on the political crisis during the so-called Prague Spring of the late 1960s. The closest parallel to Koller’s work can be made out in the Gorgona group, which is regarded as the initiator of anti-art in the former Yugoslavia. D.G.