BORIS BUĆAN

Born 1947 in Zagreb, Croatia, where he lives and works, Boris Bućan is considered by many critics to be a pioneer in the New Art Practice Movement.  

Completing his studies at renowned institutions of School of Applied Arts, the Academy of Plastic Arts (both in Zagreb), as well as the Academy of Visual Arts in Ljubljana, Bućan graduated in 1972 with a major in painting.

Bućan’s developed skills and extensive education inspired him to begin combining new to the era visual technology including Polaroids, film, photography, graphic design, and photocopies creatively with traditional visual art. This effort would go on to build the New Art Practice Movement with other Croatian artists. Their conceptual practices gravitated toward public space, breaking away from the gallery system, as an act of resistance against institutional infrastructures, which, at the time, were dominated by lyrical abstraction.

During the late-1960s the New Art Practice Movement came to prominence in Zagreb thanks to Bućan’s street installations. Highly colourful and taking full advantage of the urban environment, Bućan’s artworks were bold additions to the Zagreb cityscape, drawing comparison to Pop Art, while remaining independent in style and scope. In parallel with painting, he has maintained a prolific career as a graphic designer, producing posters for galleries, theatre, the Croatian Radio and Television, and National Theatre. In 1984 Bucan represented Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale with a series of theatre posters.

He is one of the most successful Croatian artists in history, not just for receiving more than 20 international awards and commendations (many of which are Grand Prix) in 1984., but mostly for receiving the headline of the representative catalogue of the world-famous Victoria&Albert Museum in London. Bućan’s works now reside in the most prominent world museums and galleries (New York, München, Essen, Melbourne).
Bućan presented his works on more than 80 independent art shows (Ljubljana, Edinburgh, Venecija, Sarajevo, Shanghai, Ankara, Zagreb, Melbourne, New Jersey, Copenhagen, Adelaide, Jerusalem, Dordrecht, Wiesbaden, Berlin, Osijek, Rijeka), and participated in more than 160 collective exhibitions both home and abroad.
He was the winner of the “Life Work” award of the Croatian Designer Society in 2006.