Karol Pichler
Karol Pichler, Photo by Christophe Deshayes
Karol Pichler (Bratislava, Slovakia, 1957) lives in Lyon. Karol Pichler is an intermedia artist, one of the main representant of post-conceptual tendencies in Slovakia, dealing with installations, videos, design, or artist book. Many of his works are based on interaction requiring the recipient’s playful participation. In his projects, a kind of visual and intellectual games, often intended for public space, he balances on the edge of art, design and social experiment. He is usually working with texts, pictograms and various symbols, codes with metaphors, hidden in mystic rebuses, inspired by hermetic “secret” traditions of the West (Neo-Platonism, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism). In his complex installations/situations, Pichler uses often “short-term” materials as paper, textile and ready-made objects, his works are ephemeral situations and messages.
In 1985 he was graduated at MOME (Moholy – Nagy University of Art and Design) in Budapest. In the years 1986 – 1996 he was pedagogically active in the School of Applied Arts in Bratislava. From 1984 he participated on numerous group shows as DELETE (Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia, 2012), PragueBiennale (Prague, 2011), Diorama – Videoarte Eslovaca (Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2011), Eighties (Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, 2009) and he had been presented at solo shows at Ľudovít Fulla Gallery (SK) in 2018, in Nitra Gallery, Nitra, (SK) in 2010, at Centro Cultural Justiça Federal, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 2009, or in Parque das Ruinas, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 2009 he became a laureate of the designer competition prize “22° Premio Design” in Museo da Casa Brasileira in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Pichler also pursues scenic design (among others, he created the set for a large Yves Saint Laurent show in Rio de Janeiro) and fashion design.