Our post today comes from Natasha Russell, Graduate Studio Assistant in Printmaking at ECA.

Recently we spent a couple of hours piecing together and marveling at a stack of 18 or so large scale oil based screen prints by the Artist Boris Bucan. These have recently been taken in by the Art Collection, gathered from the plan chests in the Print Workshop of Edinburgh College of Art where they had sat for almost three decades.

Viewing these prints was no easy feat as the prints measure two by two metres squared and are each made up of six pieces of thin cartridge-like paper. Spreading them out on the carpet between shifted tables we ordered and puzzled together the prints to form vibrant and masterfully composed posters.

The pieces here range from posters for Operas to Theatrical productions to National days. One of the posters is even for his own exhibition that exhibited these prints when they were last shown in Edinburgh, detailing, ‘Posters for Croatian National Theatre…Edinburgh College of Art…27 April 1984’. This solved the mystery of where they came from and how long they had been hiding in the plan chests.

While there are distinct motifs carrying between some of the prints, for example the geometric grass patterns, the posters vary widely in style. They span from scribbly crayon drawn monochrome prints for Puccini’s La Boheme to the bold colours of the checker-boarded ‘Faust’ that plays with a simple shape to create an optical illusion like scene.  In this way his prints prove a great example of the diversity of this printmaking technique.

Bucan was born in Zagreb in 1947, where he continued to study and produce work as a graphic artist. Indeed most of these prints are printed with a mark of Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts.  He is still working and exhibiting internationally.