Oedipus Poster Wins Zgraf 13 Excellence Award

I am pleased to let you know that my poster Oedipus, which I created for JDP – Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade, Serbia, has won the Zgraf 13's Excellence Award. Zgraf is an international graphic design and visual arts communication show held in Zagreb, Croatia. Zgraf is organized by ULUPUH – the Croatian Association of Applied Arts.  

This award was given by the international jury of prominent figures in the design world: Peter Bankov, Melike Tascioglu Vaughan, Don Ryun Chang, Izvorka Jurić, and Lawrence Zeegen. They awarded a total of nineteen awards and honorable mentions.  

The Executive Board of Zgraf 13, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Zgraf, awarded five Zgraf 50 Honor Awards for special contribution to Zgraf and I was one of the recipients.  I would like to extend my gratitude to Zgraf for this honor.

 

My Work at European Design Festival Show

I’m pleased to let you know that starting June 6th, my work is being featured in the Eccentricityexhibition, part of the European Design Festival 2025 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The exhibition includes my design for Prljavo Kazalište’s LP record, covers created for Danas and Time magazines, and my OP-ED page designs for The New York Times.

 

European Design Festival 2025 is taking place in Ljubljana, and is organized by the Brumen Foundation. One of the central events of the Festival is the exhibition Eccentricity – Design From the Off-Centre, which explores contemporary design and the historical legacy of design in the former Yugoslav republics through the thematic lens of radical and unconventional design approaches. These approaches deliberately break established standards, challenge or even invert our perceptions of what design and visual communication are.

 

The exhibition concept revolves around two related notions – eccentricity and off-centre – to simultaneously express both the nature of the creative practices showcased and the position of our design cultures in relation to the so-called centres, to what is often uncritically accepted as the source, model, or mainstream of design throughout history and today. In other words, rather than positioning ourselves in relation to undeniably strong (“Western”) traditions of typography, posters, illustration, book design, advertising, and the like, this exhibition confronts us with works defined by strong concepts and provocative communication gestures. These are realized across a broad spectrum of media and approaches, all aiming to understand design as a reflective and discursive practice – one that, beyond métier and skill, has something to say about communication itself, the social context in which it emerges, the public space it inhabits, the ripples it creates – and, above all, about ourselves.

 

The exhibition includes works by designers, studios, and artists such as Mihajlo Arsovski, Boris Bućan, Dora Bilić & Tina Mueller, Vanja Cuculić, Sanja Bachrach Kristofić & Mario Krištofić, Branko Bačanović Bambi, Ferenc Barat, Jože Brumen, Lana Cavar & Narcisa Vukojević, Eduard Čehovin, Zoran Đukić / ĐKĆ, Bojana Fajmut, Orsat Franković, Damir Gamulin, Grupa Ee, Mirko Ilić, Sanja Iveković, Radmila Jovandić Đapić, Mihajlo Kalabić, Šejla Kamerić, Dalida Karić-Hadžiahmetović, Anur Hadžiomerspahić, Tomato Košir, Dejan Kršić, Tomaž Kržišnik, Miljenko Licul, Boris Ljubičić, Dalibor Martinis, Slobodan Mašić, Studio Imitacija Života, Ira Payer /Superstudio, Studio Sonda, Ranko Novak, Novi Kolektivizam, Zdravko Papič, Nejc Prah, Sanja Iveković, Goran Trbuljak, Tanja Radež, Petja Selan, Slavimir Stojanović, Talent, Trio Sarajevo, Jovan Trkulja, Borut Vild, Matjaž Vipotnik, Ivana Vučić, Marko Vuleta Đukanov, Irena Woelle, Primož Zorko and many others.

 

The author of the Eccentricity exhibition is Marko Golub.

 

"100 Years – 100 Objects" at The Design Museum in Munich

I am very pleased to share that my COVID awareness poster "Don't Stop, Keep Going, Be Safe" was chosen to represent the year 2020 in the show "100 Years – 100 Objects" at Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum in Munich, Germany.   

On the occasion of its 100th anniversary, Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich is presenting an exhibition of 100 objects. These 100 objects reflect the richness and diversity of Die Neue Sammlung. In addition to numerous iconic works, this selection features many unknown treasures that have never before been seen at the Pinakothek der Moderne. This unusual presentation does not follow a traditional chronology, but rather focuses on the time in which the objects came to the museum. Sorting them by acquisition year allows for a new perspective on the museum's collection history. The presentation reflects trends, insights, and influences, allowing for a new examination of the collection and bringing it to life.  

Photos by Gerhardt Kellermann 

 

Movie poster by Jean Giraud-Moebius

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.

 

"Dramatic Classics Through the Eyes of Graphic Designers"

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.

Nezumi by Mamoru Uchiyama

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.

 

The Front Page of "Cazador y presa" by Arturo Del Castillo

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.