David Nez Reflects on OHO Group's 1960s-70s Avant-Garde Practice and Post-Yugoslav Spiritual Journey

David Nez, born in 1949 in Massachusetts, USA, joined the Ljubljana-based OHO Group in 1968 alongside Milenko Matanović, Marko Pogačnik, and Andraž Šalamun. He moved to Slovenia after his father, a United Nations City Planner, worked on Skopje's reconstruction following the 1963 earthquake. Nez studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, creating objects, environments, installations, and participating in happenings, photo projects, and films with OHO. His notable works include landscape mirror installations and the 1972 diploma exhibition at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. OHO's projects, often ephemeral and site-specific, explored themes like time-space relationships, alchemical opposites, and public interaction, documented through photography. Influences ranged from Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria to mysticism, Zen, and Ouspensky's fourth-dimension theories. After OHO, Nez traveled to India for meditation, lived at Scotland's Findhorn community, and returned to the U.S., eventually becoming an art therapist in Portland, Oregon. He continues to create artwork inspired by alchemy and archetypal symbolism.