Boris Bućan was born in Zagreb in 1947. He studied at the School of Applied Arts in Zagreb, the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana and the Academy of Plastic Arts in Zagreb, from which he graduated in 1972. As a member of the New Art Practice generation, Bućan has sought to elevate visual art through the use of cutting-edge technologies. This has led him to use photography, Polaroids, photocopies, film, video and graphic design throughout his career. His technical oeuvre has been geared towards a cultural and political renunciation of gallery networks and institutional subjugation through appropriating public spaces using artistic interventions.
Armed with this background, Bućan has developed his own novel vernacular, somewhere between the irony of Pop Art and the institutional criticism of conceptual practices. Advertising, in particular, has inspired his desire to visually colonise public space and organically leave the gallery and institution. Public interventions have been fundamental in cementing his reputation, such as when he painted the pavement of a street in central Zagreb bright blue, which mixed performance’s ‘presentness’ with Pop Art’s playfulness, while also functioning as an act of rebellion. In his graphic practice, Bućan borrowed the logos and symbols of capitalist consumerism (Coca-Cola, IBM, Swissair, BMW and countless others) and simply replaced the brand names with the word ‘art’. This basic yet impactful change served to question the purpose of both images (the original and the artistic one) and simultaneously comment on the gallery system, which was progressively turning artworks into mercantile ‘goods’. In doing so, Bućan accompanied and commented on – one could say mocked – the capitalist turn following Yugoslavia’s economic emergence, and the shrinking place and perverted roles of art and culture in this economic model.
Bućan has also been a prolific graphic designer throughout his career and has conceived posters and other communication materials for theatres (including for Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird at the National Theatre of Croatia in Split), Croatian radio and television and, ironically, art galleries. By participating in mass cultural consumerism, Bućan has been better able to disrupt it. His talent for image crafting has generated much interest and recognition. The poster for The Firebird, for example, was chosen as the cover of The Power of the Poster exhibition’s catalogue at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 1998. Posters also made up Bućan’s submission to the 1984 Venice Biennale, where he represented Yugoslavia.
