Boris Bućan
(1947)
Dog, 1988
oil on canvas
140 x 90 cm
MG-5595
Boris Bućan is the most recognizable graphic designer among painters and the most prominent painter among graphic designers. His street paintings are deliberately frequently picturesque, and the images created with a verbal-visual coda are often poster-like. The value and valorisation of Bućan’s posters is internationally recognized. His advertising is inventive, intricate, truly artistic and not at all innocent. His poster is, therefore, also an anti-poster (N. Beroš), and his powerful painting is often also a pictorial verbalization. He started studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 1967, and he graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1972. According to B. Franceschi, Bućan is one of the most successful artists who congregated around the SC Gallery programme in the late 1960s. According to the same author, Bućan resisted institutional art with his colouring the city interventions, and by transgressing media and class demarcations he encourages the expansion and extension of art into real life. In visual arts, he explores the issue of an anonymous media message and subjectivizes it with witty interventions in the template (Bućan Art, 1973). His large-scale posters are associated with Pop-Art and Conceptual Art, while successfully anticipating Post-Modernism (I. Stravinsky, Firebird, 1983). The painting Dog from 1988 represents an embodiment of instinctive energy in the animal motif that permeates the entire expressive scene. He represented Croatia at the 1984 Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Biennial in 1979 and 1989. His works are found in the collections of international museums such as the MoMA and Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, Staatliches Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Munich, the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne and Deutsches Plakat Museum in Essen. He has been a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 2006.
Text: Željko Marciuš, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb