Rudolf Sikora belongs to the most original personalities of Slovak art in the early seventies. In Central European post-conceptual art, Sikora stands out with his focus on ecological, cosmological and social issues. He realises them through hybrid compositions that combine painting, sculpture, drawing, graphics and photography.
His exhibitions are often a space-adjusted setup of works unified in the conceptual unity of motive, so they are interpreted as complex works. Sikora positions the roots of his unique cosmogony in the legacy of Russian Constructivism, especially in Maljević’s oeuvre and the poetic of characteristic signs and motifs in which energy is accumulated.
During the normalisation process in Czechoslovakia, in the year 1970 in Bratislava, he founded the First Open Studio, the cult alternative exhibition space that organised workshops and public discussions. Its programme became one of the focus points of conceptual art in Central Europe. Although Sikora’s work is focused on questions of humanity, the meaning of human existence in “this small planet” and its importance in space and time. Due to social activism, the publications that he edited, like the anthology of texts Symposium I (1973), were banned by the secret police. Through diplomatic channels, he was prevented from participating in international exhibitions and award contests (the Biennial of Posters in Warsaw, 1975), and until 1988 he was declined membership in national professional associations. He is the author of numerous lectures on the relationship between the esoteric, ecology and astronomy and his artistic work. His ontological and cosmological interest and thematic preoccupation were suspicious to the state administration because of excessive generality and negligence of the class struggle issues. In the late 1970s, on Christmas Eve, on the outskirts of Zvolen in central Slovakia, he intervened in the existing Out of Town I landscape, stepping out of his studio into an open public space in search of new alternative spaces for his art projects. On that occasion, he marked the surface with a large arrow with red pigment on a snow-covered field. Sikora performed later versions in the form of serigraphs Out of Town II and III.