My recent acquisition is one of the biggest single posters (120x160cm / 47x63 inches) I have ever owned. The poster is drawn by Jean Giraud-Moebius for the French movie Touche pas à la femme blanche! (Don't Touch the White Woman!) from 1974. He also did multiple simple cartoony versions of the poster for the same movie.
My other poster of the same size is also a French movie poster for the movie SPYS from 1974, also illustrated by Jean Giraud-Moebius.
I am happy to announce that four of my posters for the JDP-Yugoslav Drama Theater in Belgrade were included in the theater posters exhibition at the International Festival of Small Stages, organized by HKD Teatar, Rijeka, Croatia. The exhibition was opened on May 3rd, 2025.
Text excerpts from the exhibition catalogue:
"Dramatic classics through the eyes of graphic designers
A look back at the three decades of the Rijeka Festival of Small Stages will help us understand the global and technological changes that have occurred during that period. It was a period in which the material world dissolved into the digital, and the boundary between physical and virtual reality became increasingly difficult to perceive. Communication is layered into numerous new forms that are already difficult to follow, and social networks are an unavoidable part of our everyday lives. In this context, we could experience the poster as an outdated medium of communication. However, it still resists being removed from the theater facade and retains its printed form.
That is precisely why this 'traditional' medium has been a frequent content and topic of accompanying exhibitions of festival programs over the past three decades. Through numerous exhibitions of theatre posters, the MFMS presented interesting selections of individual authorial opuses, contemporary design creations or national selections to the Rijeka and festival audiences."—Jolanda Todorović, exhibition curator
You can find out more about my JDP posters here.
My recent acquisition is this page of manga Nezumi (chapter 3) by Mamoru Uchiyama from 1999. I bought this page not only because it's drawn well, but also because I have never seen in comics somebody giving so much real state to the bottom of a foot. I found it very effective.
Here, here, here, here, here, and here you can see some of my other manga acquisitions.
My latest acquisition is the original front page of the comic Cazador y presa by Arturo Del Castillo. I am quite pleased to get this one because I already have this comic's third and last pages. You can see them here and here.
What is beautiful about Arturo's drawing is how gentle and seemingly easily drawn it is. He doesn't even bother to erase the pencil drawing, which, by the way, is very minimal.
Most of the time, the only corrections he had, as in this case, were when he changed his mind and whitened out the frames around the images. And because he used fabric dipped in ink to make textures, which was hard to control, he corrected that with white gouache.
You can see other Arturo Del Castillo's comic page in my collection here.
On March 6th, the exhibition "Uglies: The Puppets of Zlatko Bourek" opened at Galerija Kresija in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The exhibition was curated by Tjaša Juhart of the Puppet Museum of the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre.
Zlatko Bourek mostly created for an adult audience. The exhibition also presents his cult play Hamlet, which was the biggest hit in the field of puppet performances for adults in his oeuvre. In this, he first staged his own derivative of the Japanese technique of cart puppets, which the animators hold in their laps and lend them their legs. The play was a turning point for both Croatian puppetry and puppetry in the former commonwealth. It is inscribed in the canon of world puppetry, and it has traveled practically the entire world.
Zlatko was a true Renaissance man. He was a painter, sculptor, costume designer, scenographer, and illustrator. He directed theatre plays, feature films, and animated movies.
I was pleased to see that the curator of the exhibition, Tjaša Juhart, decided to include my poster for his play Hamlet in the exhibition.
I met Zlatko for the first time when I was seventeen years old and I had a summer job working at Zagreb Film. In 1981 I was fortunate to design a poster for his puppet show of Hamlet by Tom Stoppard.
He was one of the most generous, soft-spoken people I have ever met. That's probably why we became friends, and that's probably why he painted me in one of his paintings.
