The exhibition featured over a dozen theatre posters from the 1970s and 1980s by Boris Bućan, the world-famous Croatian painter, graphic artist, and poster designer. The hallmarks of the artist’s distinctive conceptual style are bright colours, geometrization and multiplication of motifs, which are arranged in eye-catching, sometimes even psychedelic patterns. The exhibition was organised in conjunction with Croatia’s presidency of the Council of the European Union.

Boris Bućan (b. 1947 in Zagreb) is considered to be one of Croatia’s first contemporary artists. During the economic boom of the 1960s and 1970s and the accompanying fascination with Western consumerism in the former Yugoslavia, he created a style that lies somewhere between Op-art and Pop art. His street actions in the centre of Zagreb, such as painting the pavement and placing colourful paintings in the streets, which were an expression of rebellion against the confinement of art to the ossified gallery and institutional system and treating it like a mere commodity, have gone down in history.

The artist consistently developed his unique style. Using photographs of well-known subjects, images from mass culture, cartoons, human figures, faces, and pictures of animals, he explored the processes of interaction between art and the viewer. He insisted on the ambivalence of the message and the complete marginalization of information in favour of the visual dimension, making his posters full-fledged artistic statements. Information about the dates and places of the advertised events, placed in small print in the margins, became Bućan’s ‘signature’, his unique trademark. The artist gained worldwide fame with a poster designed for the Croatian National Theatre in Split, which announced Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird. It was reproduced on the cover of the catalogue of the exhibition The Power of the Poster at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 1998.

Boris Bućan

Sixteen of Bućan’s best-known posters from the 1960s and ’70s were exhibited in the ICC’s medieval cellars. This was the first exhibition of the Croatian poster artist’s work in Poland.

The exhibition was held as part of the cultural programme that accompanied Croatia’s presidency of the Council of the European Union. It was co-organised by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb.

Curators

Kristina Bonjeković Stojković (MSU)

Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb

dr Monika Rydiger

Curator, International Cultural Centre, Kraków

Karolina Wójcik

Curator, International Cultural Centre, Kraków

Curators

Kristina Bonjeković Stojković (MSU)

Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb

Kristina Bonjeković Stojković is in charge of the Contemporary Art Museum`s (in Zagreb) department of drawings and prints.

dr Monika Rydiger

Curator, International Cultural Centre, Kraków

Art historian and critic, curator. She curated or co-curated such exhibitions as Hunting Down Modernism: The Prohibited Arts in the Third Reich (2011), Memory: Registers and Territories (2013), MAKOM. Dani Karavan. The Essence of Place (2015), The Logic of the Local: Norwegian and Polish Contemporary Design (2016). She is a member of the Polish section of AICA (International Association of Art Critics), vice president of the Association of Art Historians, Kraków Branch. Author of texts on modern and contemporary art, specialising in sculpture and architecture.

Karolina Wójcik

Curator, International Cultural Centre, Kraków

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