A theatre poster is much more than a promotional tool for a production, event, or festival. It is woven into the very fabric of theatrical magic, standing alongside the actors, set design, costumes, direction, script, and story. If we look more closely, it is the only aspect of theatre that spills out onto the street, communicating with passers-by whether or not they ever step inside to watch the performance. In this sense, the poster plays a key role in our very understanding of theatre, marking the crucial boundary that separates the real world from the stage. The theatre poster is a fissure between two realities, a space where the ordinary can become extraordinary, and vice versa. Owing to a series of bold artistic departures by its designers, supported at times by a particularly propulsive institutional framework, the Croatian National Theatre Split (HNK Split) has emerged as one of the key contexts for the creation of some of the most remarkable, unconventional, and provocative theatre posters. Its prominent place in the history of design and visual culture is owed above all to Boris Bućan, who created his most celebrated posters for this very institution. It was these works of graphic design that he exhibited at the 1984 Venice Biennale, a prestigious international exhibition traditionally dedicated exclusively to visual art. The exhibition before you, however, also turns its attention to two additional bodies of design work that have marked the same institution in the decades before and after Bućan, both of which broaden our understanding of what makes a successful theatre poster. Unjustly overshadowed by Bućan are the exceptionally clever, witty, and at times provocatively bold posters by Gorki Žuvela from the 1970s, as well as the unpredictable, intriguing, and semantically vibrant works of Alem Ćurin from the 1990s and 2000s. While many other designers have contributed to shaping HNK Split’s visual identity, this trio has been selected here due to space limitations and their uniquely distinct approaches to theatre poster design.
It is impossible to faithfully recreate the experience of encountering an original Bućan poster through a reproduction, especially when we consider that his characteristic square posters for HNK are approximately two metres wide and equally tall – their immense scale pulls the observers into a landscape specifically crafted for them. This was precisely the intention: the posters were conceived not merely as invitations to the theatre, but as theatre itself, suddenly unveiling a surreal, magical, dynamic, and flourishing world before the audience. Moreover, all the informational content, text and typography, has been moved from the centre to the margins, within a black frame, as though stepping aside to clear the observer’s path, or perhaps opening a passage for Bućan’s wondrous creations to enter our world. Bućan’s posters do not directly depict or explain the plays themselves; rather, through their visual riddles, they present a single, often central image that becomes synonymous with the story. In Roko and Cicibela, this is a boat carrying two impoverished figures as it cuts through waves resembling delicate fabric; in Lysistrata, four resolute women march to end the Peloponnesian War; and in The Firebird, a mythical creature from Russian folklore takes centre stage. These posters often combine elements from different periods and styles – for example, the Lysistrata poster (1982) reimagines Helmut Newton’s famous photograph They Are Coming (the nude version), which appeared in Vogue the year before. With their extreme stylisation, Bućan’s posters call upon influences ranging from figures on ancient Greek vases and Egyptian wall paintings to Art Nouveau and Art Deco.
At first glance, Gorki Žuvela’s posters made for the same theatre in the preceding years present a stark contrast to Bućan’s. They are raw and almost documentary in style, mostly in black and white with only occasional touches of colour, heavily reliant on photography and firmly rooted in the realities of their time. In fact, this close connection to contemporary life is a key characteristic of Žuvela’s posters from the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the Hairdressers poster (1975), Žuvela features Hajduk football club’s star of the era, Jurica Jerković (notable for his hairstyle), while red accents draw attention to the logo of the confectionery company Bobis in the background, a detail more prominent than both the play’s title and the theatre’s name. At this point, theatre, media reality (with television transforming football and vice versa), and everyday life all converge. A similar effect is achieved in the poster for An American Yacht in the Port of Split, which documents the presence of American warships in the harbour during the Cold War. The most radical example is the poster for Marinković’s Gloria, which completely pushes the theatrical drama aside to focus on the real-life drama of the Split National Theatre still staging productions in temporary spaces nearly ten years after a fire damaged the main building. Žuvela’s final poster for HNK was created fifteen years after their initial collaboration ended, serving as a conclusion in the form of a detective story that intertwines Shakespearean tragedy with local history. The poster for King Lear features a photograph of the renowned 11th-century relief from Split’s baptistery, into which Žuvela has inserted a dagger in the hand of one of the protagonists approaching the king. This witty intervention is all the more clever because it is unclear what the figure on the relief was originally holding (likely a scroll), allowing for an imaginative twist into a dramatic and violent Shakespearean tale.
The last of the three, the legendary illustrator, comic artist, and graphic designer Alem Ćurin, began developing his unique approach to theatre posters in the early 1990s. He had worked continuously for HNK until the close of the decade and returned periodically thereafter. During the turbulent war and post-war transitional years, Ćurin introduced a vibrant pop sensibility to HNK’s visual identity – bold colours, comic-inspired stylisation, quotes and characters lifted directly from the realm of graphic novels. This approach itself set him apart from both of his predecessors in various ways. Yet, Ćurin’s true distinction lay not only in his technical skill and style but also in his extraordinary and unpredictable imagination. His posters explore unexpected and startling transformations – one motif turns into another, then into a third; the figures are part human, part animal, and part object. Their tone is never fixed; sometimes they feel eerie, other times joyful and sensuous. Ćurin avoids straightforward symbolism or clear-cut interpretations of the dramatic text; instead, our gaze wanders over the poster’s surface, uncovering new details and twists, masks beneath masks, and more masks beyond those. Ćurin’s illustrations, of course, originate from theatre, but rather than simply illustrating the text, they indulge in a visual poetry of free association that carries the viewer along. And where to? To the theatre.
Marko Golub