MIRKO ILIĆ

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary  Art Rijeka will host the retrospective exhibition of Mirko Ilić in a layout somewhat altered in comparison to the premiere Zagreb edition. Scheduled for July and August of 2008, the Rijeka edition of Mirko Ilić: comics / illustration / design / multimedia 1975–2008 is expected to be an extraordinary event at local culture scene, as a show of equal interest to the older audience that experiences Ilić as an acquaintance, looking forward to another encounter with him, as well as to the younger audience who thanks to this exhibition has been given an opportunity of an almost integral insight into the author's previous oeuvre. By the onset of the 1980s Ilić initiated a new wave of Croatian public interest in comics, powerfully marked a breach of design into our region and achieved outstanding results in illustration, 3D graphics and education.

We would like use this occasion to stress that retrospective exhibition of Mirko Ilić was organized by Vizum, The Society for Popular Culture Research and Polikom PR Agency.  A fact that museums and galleries are absent from the organizers' list can be explained partly by administrative inertia which is unavoidable when it comes to finances, and by a fact that museums and galleries slowly refocus at new operating conditions. Soon after the Zagreb exhibition was opened, Rijeka Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art recognized a value of the project and overcame administrative and technical difficulties. Aided by maximal understanding, support and engagement on behalf of Mirko Ilić, Dejan Kršić, The Society for Popular Culture Research, Vizum and Polikom PR Agency, along with the City of Rijeka who supported the proposition, the Museum arranged to take over and set up the exhibition in its own space. The Museum declares Ilić's retrospective in Rijeka as the expert interest regarding fulfilment of Museum's own mission that is obligatory in a sense of creating conditions for and working on processing the themes such as identity branding and design in contemporary conditions.
When it comes to design, the peculiarity of current cultural situation lays with a fact that spectacle and ideologized information masterfully dominate mutated  cities, networked into global processes which comprise the code denotations of "small ones" that await to be branded. In decoding numerous themes whose brand's power is imposing, the potential engagement by Mirko Ilić is anticipated.

A story called Mirko Ilić has risen at Croatian cultural horizon suddenly, in the early 1970s. At the time Ilić started a wave of interest of Croatian public for comics and illustration. Soon  afterwards in 1986, as in a fairy tale, he strolled in US with a suitcase in his hand and had his American dream almost come true. He never cut off his connections to Croatia. In 1998/99 Ilić created a visual identity for the 14th International Exhibition of Drawings in Rijeka. This poster was awarded with a high American acclaim and the author had a solo exhibition in Mali salon Gallery in Rijeka, which for unknown reasons is not listed amongst his Croatian shows. At the exhibition, Rijeka public was presented with illustrations and a title sequence for a feature film You've  Got Mail.
Sex and Lies was the title of his  2002 solo exhibition that was shown in Split and Zagreb and  presented his 3D prints cycle with surreal and erotic contents. These works achieved a large-scale recognizability only after one of the motifs was used for a cover of novel Uho, Grlo, Nož  (Ear, Throat, Knife) by Vedrana Rudan. The book was accompanied by a needlepoint, renamed as an interactive print. It was not before 2007, after  prolonged negotiations, that Ilić had his Zagreb exhibition titled Mirko Ilić-  30 Years After, which elaborated a beginning period of his activity in a context of the rise of punk in Yugoslavia. The exhibition is precious from the aspect of systematizing culture phenomena of the ex-Yugoslavia and refers to development of both punk and the appearance of Pankrti.  At the same time it treats but a segment of Ilić's opus, which is integrated in his monograph that was written by Dejan Kršić. This book is not the first  to deal with Ilić's biography but is certainly amongst those that include more complete data.