Museion presents, in collaboration with mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna and The Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, the largest retrospective ever shown of the works of Július Koller (Piešt’any, Slovacchia 1939- Bratislava, 2007). Koller is one of the most important Eastern European artists working since the 1960s, whose art had and has considerable international significance.

The exhibition documents his independent contribution to the neo-avantgarde and based on painstaking research into his art and archives. Alongside works of international relevance there will be works, archive material and inedited ephemera presented. Koller‘s work developed in critical distance to the communist authorities and their official art, and it also questioned traditions in modernism and the conventions of the Western art business. Since the mid-1960s he designed Antihappenings and Antipictures, creating a playfully ironic oeuvre that combined a Dadaist spirit with radical-skeptical stance. Koller painted object-images in white latex and pictures of question marks that became the universal symbol of his critical view of everyday life and reality.

Koller saw tennis and table tennis as participatory art forms and here too he combined sport with political statement by demanding that the rules of the game and fair play be adhered to—as the basis of all social action – a statement that is of utmost relevance even today, given the current international political situation. After the Prague Spring was put down, Koller began his U.F.O.naut series that challenged reality with “cultural situations” and utopias of a new, cosmohumanistic culture and future.