ZDRAVKO MIĆANOVIĆ – Poster-Event

The exhibition will be opened by: Miroslav Mušić, art historian

Author of the exhibition: Zdravko Mićanović

Curator of the exhibition: Slobodan Jovanović, Museum of Applied Art

Production: Museum of Applied Art

From December 1 to 22, 2016 the Museum of Applied Art will host the exhibition dedicated to the creative output of Zdravko Mićanović (b. 1952). The works of this artist explore the relation between space and time in poster design. Respective posters at the exhibition Poster-Event depict individual “events”, which together represent “all of space at a given time”, this becoming parts of a wider body of works communicating between themselves.

The exhibition Poster-Event also features three identical posters, only titled differently: Explosion/Stain, Stain/Explosion and Explosiooon (1978-2016). These works are based on the 1978 poster Explosion/Stain – namely, a picture of a stain created by spilling paint on the paper, a procedure applied on the poster for the alternative theatre production (happening) of the Group “Tijelo/Prostor” (“Body/Space”) titled Performance in the Yard (Tuzla, 1978). The poster realized at that moment had gradually become the “zero poster” – a point of reference for some future posters from Zdravko Mićanović’s opus, marked by the idea of explosion as a symbol of the chaos, which precedes the idea of the “stain” as a symbol of artistic consistence. During the 1980s the motif of the stain becomes central, thereby introducing a detail which is not directly associated with the topics of the announced event, but can be interpreted as a specific signature of the artist.

After arriving in Belgrade in 1992, Zdravko Mićanović began to use the “collage-montage” procedure in conceiving his works, with increasing frequency. Creating posters meant an artistic intervention over the elements of the two-dimensional space, i.e. composing drawings and photographs or, later, interventions on the photographs of found objects. The artist resorted to the procedures of montage to reveal the poetics of relations established through this connection of patchy (or uniform) elements.

In the concluding stage of his research in poster design, the artist turns to the poster as a non-medium i.e. to the poster as a realm of expression of certain concepts unrelated with the classical use of the poster – announcement of the aforementioned “event”. In this way the poster itself becomes an “event”, and communication with the audiences is no longer determined by the function of the poster, but by the semiotic means used by the artist, whereby the observer, the poster, the space around them, and the time of their existence all become elements of an art happening. Thus we reach Mićanović’s relativization of the term “poster”, which becomes a “poster-event”, argues curator Slobodan Jovanović in the catalogue of this exhibition.

The exhibition in the Museum of Applied Art also features the reconstructed piece Poster-Event (2016), conceived some thirty years ago for a company in Tuzla. The original poster was simple – A4 sheets of various colours were mounted on walls. The present Poster-Event consists of 48 blocks with 48 differently coloured small size sticker-sheets. The visitors of the exhibition are invited to perform an action on the poster – by tearing, drawing on or unsticking the separate sheets. This happening should be taking place during the entire exhibition, but it depends on the visitors whether some sheet would stay in place until the closing of the exhibition, or only the pad would remain. The whole process will be documented with a video-record. In this way, the three dimensions of the rooms in which the exhibition takes place intertwine with the fourth, temporal dimension.