MAŠIĆ: Retrospective Exhibition of Visual Communications by Slobodan Mašić

MAŠIĆ
Retrospective Exhibition of Visual Communications by Slobodan Mašić

A guest exhibition of the Museum of Applied Art, Belgrade
Cultural Centre of Serbia
123, rue Saint Martin, Paris, France
18^th December, 2021 – 28^th February, 2022

Opening ceremony: 18^th December, 2021, at 07:00 p.m.
Biljana Jotić, Museum of Applied Art’s Acting Director, and Slobodan Jovanović, exhibition author and Museum of Applied Art’s senior curator, will speak at the exhibition’s opening.

Exhibition visual identity design: Borut Vild.

The exhibition MAŠIĆ – Retrospective Exhibition of Visual Communications by Slobodan Mašić, organized as part of the Museum of Applied Art’s Salon of Contemporary Art (12^th September – 19^th October, 2018), achieved extraordinary success in Belgrade and attracted great media attention. It was named the best exhibition of the year in the Republic of Serbia according to the selection made by the Serbian Association of Art Historians. Furthermore, the authors of the exhibition catalogue texts: Slobodan Jovanović, Borut Vild, Jerko Denegri and Miroslav Mušić, received the Pavle Vasić Award, the most prestigious award that could be won in Serbia for the texts written about applied art and that is given by the Association of Applied Arts Artists and Designers of Serbia. The exhibition MAŠIĆ – Retrospective Exhibition of Visual Communications by Slobodan Mašić, staged at the Cultural Centre of Serbia in Paris, represents the greatest part of the visual communications and independent publications designs which were created by Slobodan Mašić and which were displayed at the exhibition held in the Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade in 2018.

Slobodan Mašić, the 1980s

Slobodan Mašić (1939–2016, Belgrade) was one of the most significant artists and independent publishers who have shaped visual communications in Serbia and Yugoslavia over the past half century. During his studies at the Faculty of Architecture (1958–1964), he met his future wife and his most important associate, Saveta Puhalo, later Mašić. Having completed his studies, he started applying the experience gained at the faculty in the design of visual communications. At the time, he created posters and catalogues for the Youth Centre and the Graphic Collective in Belgrade, launched the book edition Nezavisna izdanja, founded the design studio Studio Structure, created graphic designs for various books and magazines, such as Susret, NB’68 and ROK, made intros for cult Yugoslav films and started collaborating with the theatre Atelje 212, as well as the film festival FEST. Mašić’s design for the Belgrade theatre festival BITEF is one of the most important works in the field of visual communications in Serbia and the former Yugoslavia. During a 26-year-long collaboration, from 1971 to 1996, Mašić was changing BITEF’s graphic designs. He began with ideograms and photographs of objects, then used photographs of human body parts (for decades cooperating with photographers Branislav Nikolić and Vladimir Popović), to finally combine multiplied photographs, ideograms and various signs into a specific design that is becoming recognisable worldwide as the design of the BITEF festival.

Slobodan Mašić was one of the first independent publishers in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. As part of his edition Nezavisna izdanja, he published more than three hundred books by writers, poets, historians, theorists and artists. Slobodan Mašić received many international and national awards for his artwork. Through graphic design and visual communications design for cultural institutions – galleries, museums, film and theatre festivals – he participated in spreading awareness of the importance of design in society. The aspiration to educate society about the importance of quality visual communications was the ideological starting point of his graphic design and, at the same time, his most significant contribution to the history of art and design in Yugoslavia and Serbia.