Space of Soul

This, again new, visual experience, this time provoked by Lubo Kristek’s installations, in which the artist moves with selected participants like in a trance, also allowing surreal perceptions to resonate; it seems that he disturbs the relationship to time and space and helps the viewer realize his unconsciousness.
With his performance pieces, the ‘Mythological Landscapes’, as they are called, he uncovers for a while the space of soul to the viewer. For him, the encounters on the boundary of life and death in his artistic production represent an everyday challenge. In his creative process, we may observe a connection with Freudian psychoanalysis, and his happenings and performances take place in the sense of so called ‘Activité Paranoïque Critique’ in which the artist has the opportunity to develop his extraordinary abilities and fall into a trance – with a totally unexpected ending. Concurrently, Lubo Kristek searches to open new spaces, he tries to vibrate unknown strings of the viewer’s soul, and the aim of his performance pieces is to mentally overcome, by the force of artistic creation and intuition, even death. (...)
We can feel these performance pieces resemble dadaism of the end of the 1920s, the art–literary revolutionary movement, which questioned the modern civilization of that time and the civic culture in general. We can observe that the performances are in continuity with action art, particularly in pop art, which had similar objectives, i.e. it was aiming to dissolve the boundaries between art and everyday life; in his happenings, we can recognize the New York art scene – especially the one of the 1960s – and the affinity with the performances of the West German artists such as Vostell, Beuys or Voth.
Johanna Kerschner, Medizin + Kunst, München, 3/1994, pp. 20–22