The renowned Slovak artist Rudolf Sikora calls his Berlin exhibition “Decay of Symbols”. The title refers both to his recent works that will be on display in the exhibition, which in themselves represent “disintegrated coats of arms”, and, in a figurative sense, to the concrete political and cultural situation in which Central and Eastern Europe finds itself after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In addition, this title is a symbol of the artist’s entire oeuvre, which has been developing over more than two decades and in which the theme of the disintegration of established, emblematic orders always remains central, in a negative and a positive sense.
Rudolf Sikora’s work is inseparable from the significant collective movements of the seventies in Slovakia, which marked a decisive turn in thinking and initiated a liberation from older artistic stereotypes. Hisstraightforward penchant for predominantly conceptual art is rooted in the 1970s in particular, when the artist, now a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, was involved in what Tomas Straus calls a “Slovak variant of modernism”.