Jan Kubíček 

30. december 1927 - 15. october 2013

Alojz Klimo was one of the most progressive Slovak artists since the 1960s. His inspiration in geometrical abstraction and painting shaped his specific and particular artwork signature.

The Slovak art scene of the first half of the 1960s, was marked by a formation of a group of artists, centred around the movement New Sensitivity, focused on constructivist, kinetic and light art /Milan Dobeš, Eduard Antal, Tamara Klimová, Štefan Belohradský, teoretik Arsen Pohribný/.

For Alojz Klimo, painting was of a great importance. His vivid colours brought strong expressiveness into simple compositions formed of geometrized symbols. He sought the main motifs in urban scenery. Themes of crossroads, streets and roofs of houses appear on wooden boards, paintings as well as linocuts. The picture area is divided into individual fields, each of which is defined by a bold black line.

In the series of paintings called Crossings, the individual fields were created by a system of accentuated diagonals, the series Windows and Roofs by a system of rectangles, squares or trapezes. For each segment /field/ Klimo used a specific colour, most often from a range of pure, pronounced tones. These segments were then filled with a set of stamp grids /similar technique was used, for example, by Roy Lichtenstein/.

Prints of circles and squares were frequent motifs carefully located in the individual segments of the painting, the way of their distribution might remind us of floor plans, which do not follow any strict rules of lay out and are quite sensitive.  

An interesting scheme, regularly used by Klimo is the symmetry of the composition around the vertical axis. Thus-formed works might evoke windowpanes or an open book.

Repetitiveness, symmetrical composition of the painting and simple geometric symbols clearly refer to a thoughtful conception. Nevertheless, the spontaneous usage of colour and the absence of dogmatic order allow each individual work of Alojz Klimo to express a personal and very susceptive testimony.

Alojz Klimo studied at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava/ 1941-45, prof. G. Mallý / and at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague / 1945 - 48, prof. J. Bauch /. His large movable sculpture called Coloured Transformations was presented in the Czechoslovak Pavilion at the Expo 1970 in Osaka. In 1967 he joined the Club of Concretists /banned in 1970/. After 1970, in the dark period of normalisation, Klimo did not have many opportunities to exhibit, thus he devoted himself to book illustrations, especially children's books.