» Boris Bućan: Posters and Illustrations

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Boris Bućan: Posters and Illustrations

05/17/2013

Visually arresting and conceptually rigorous, the graphic design of Boris Bućan has recently experienced renewed international interest. Bućan’s bold use of line, pattern, and color have established his design work as among the most significant to come out of Croatia.

Born in 1947 in Zagreb, and Bućan graduated from the School of Applied Arts in 1967. That year, he began studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, but later transferred to the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he finished his studies in 1972. While a student in Zagreb, Bućan began designing posters for the Student Center Gallery and the Gavella Drama Theater.

Rick Poynor, co-founder of Design Observer, recently took a close look at Bućan’s relatively unknown early posters in his article The Conceptual Posters of Boris Bućan.“What still seems surprising about these posters designed for the Student Center Gallery, the Zagreb Drama Theater, and other clients is how confidently reductive they are,” writes Poynor. “If this is not quite anti-design, it is certainly design gripped by a powerful sense of restraint.” As he notes, these minimal, pared-down designs are actually quite in tune with current aesthetic tastes, through they were produced decades ago in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It’s Bućan’s later work, however, that brought him international recognition. His most famous design – a 1983 poster for Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Firebird, one of a series of large-format posters created for the Croatian National Theater in Split – startles the eye with a shock of pattern and color. The design features a black bird with angular, white feathers wearing bright red high heels that match her beak. The bird’s shapely, human legs evoke a vague air of femininity that offsets her wide-legged stance. With her red heels planted firmly on the bottom segment of the poster’s black border, she stands, poised, in front of a thicket of linear grass. Vibrant and decorative, the image is not only eye-catching – it elicits intrigue through its enigmatic protagonist.

Boris Bucan, Firebird Petrushka [Zar Ptica], 1983. Silkscreen poster. 196 x 204cm The Poynton Bequest 2005 © Australian National Gallery

Boris Bucan, Firebird Petrushka [Zar Ptica], 1983.The Poynton Bequest 2005 © Australian National Gallery

The Victoria & Albert Museum acknowledged the poster’s design value when, in 1998, they chose it as the cover illustration for The Power of Poster, a catalogue dedicated to the visual and communicative impact of the 250 most significant posters in the museum’s collection. Though Bućan’s posters from the 1980s are distinctly decorative, they posses the same emphasis on line that drives his earlier images. Drawing inspiration from historic visual traditions that also value line, from Ancient Egyptian and African to Art Nouveau, Bućan pairs bold linearity with optically jolting pattern to create instant visual impact.

Though Bućan is generally recognized for his design work, he is also an accomplished painter and mixed media artist. Through his work, Bućan often comments on art and design history itself. In his series Bućan Art from the 1970s, for example, he pairs the word “Art” with well-known design schemes from the marketing world, such as the red Marlboro chevron. Since the late 1980s, Bućan has focused on painting gestural black and white compositions.

Bućan has had over 70 solo exhibitions around the world and has participated in more than 150 group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. In 2006, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Croatian Designers Society. Bućan’s work can be found in prominent arts institutions around the world, including the the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and the German Poster Museum. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds three of his posters, all dating to the 1970s.

In the fall of 2012, his work was selected to represent Croatian visual culture as part of the festival Croatie, la voici, organized to celebrate Croatia’s EU accession. A substantial selection of his large-format posters was exhibited in Paris at Le lieu du Design.