From the Editor

Fortuity of Making and Print Tradition in Josip Butkovic's Practice

[5,459 words] In spite of the seemingly radical deviations and experiences, the artistic oeuvre of Croatian artist Josip Butkovic retains an outstanding consistency in his chosen means of expression—the print—as well as in the selection of motifs from his immediate surroundings. The three decades’ worth of printing strategies and unorthodox methodologies developed by Butkovic markedly affect the innovative approaches seen in his country’s contemporary printmaking culture.

For Dusan Kallay, Everything Relates to Everything Else

[2,834 words] For over forty years, the sought-after illustrator of children’s books Dusan Kallay has managed to spark the imagination of hundreds of thousands of young readers. His publishing record, which incorporates over 200 titles, includes the world’s best Alice in Wonderland, as awarded by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. Illustrating books is not just a job for Mr. Kallay; it is more of an internal journey replete with discoveries that directly influence his prints.

21 Fragments of Yesterday and Tomorrow

By Eva Nikolova

[930 words] The prints of 21 Fragments of Yesterday and Tomorrow were created using light in a cameraless, inkless printmaking process. Precarious interventions allowed pictures to come to fruition as if to restore the overused image of my native landscape, the archetypal Balkans. I traversed through eras of artistic tools and technology while exhuming buried recollections of the scenery drastically transformed.

Print and Space as an Enduring Challenge in Three Rooms

By Mario Causic

[731 words] Space presents a challenge for me. The vastness of three-dimensional magnitudes beckons multidisciplinary interventions that explore people’s perceptions through the relationship of elements and events. To apply prints into the equation, I installed them as objects for the project Three Rooms and invited viewers to calculate. 

A Subconcsious Key to Ordering the World: The Artist's Book in Poland

[2,921 words] Whether in the form of painting, spatial arrangement or photography, the artist’s book has become a locus for multiple dimensions of creative expression. “Bookization” pervades contemporary art, resulting in myriad manifestations from books-objects and books-monuments to books as ideas whose existence may be autonomous or dependent on other factors.

Vincent Hloznik's Dreams (From the collection of Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection at Hebrew Home at Riverdale, New York)

[1,134 words] Among almost 250 objects from Eastern Europe, the 1962 Dreams by Slovak artist Vincent Hloznik holds a precious place in the Hebrew Home’s permanent collection. This explicit, Surrealist-style linocut series with intriguing provenance—including its creation in Communist Czechoslovakia and bypassing of the Iron Curtain for exhibition in London in 1965—portrays visual messages about warfare and humanity inspired by traumas of the 20th century. 

Jan Mericka's Screen Printed Transcriptions of Human Motion

[2,709 words] Jan Mericka has developed a visual language of movement that reveals patterns emerging from screen printed layers of schematic drawings. The patterns illustrate how people behave, enveloped in a bustling crowd and acting according to unspoken rules. Through a process of simplification, the reality in Mericka’s work becomes uncertain, challenging the viewer to question the image and information it contains.

     At about an hour’s drive north of Prague lies a ridge that culminates in Jested, a peak frequented not only for the protruding, alien-like tower of Hotel Jested, a futuristic architectural treasure from the 1960s, but also for the bike trails. Artist Jan Mericka, who settled in this region of the Czech Republic, is an avid cyclist who knows the routes by heart. His commute to work involves mounting his bicycle, pedaling through the mountain and boarding a bus to the capital city, where he teaches screen printing to photography students, trying to instigate them to employ the technique for intervention in their photographs. As it turns out, Mericka values printmaking for its creative potential rather than as a reproduction technology.