Comix!

Located between art and popular culture, combining succinctly abbreviated textual and visual methods, the comic offers the ideal conditions for its appropriation by the poster. Using contemporary examples the exhibition explores the roots of the comic in poster design. The Japanese colored woodcut, Art Nouveau, and Pop Art – each has influenced the comic in its own way. The Russian ROSTA windows of the 1920s were already employing pointed visual narratives to disseminate social content to the masses. Even today, designers employ aspects of the content and form of comics – saturated color, stereotyping, and drastic approaches to drawing and reduction in the vocabulary of facial expressions and gestures to communicate explosive messages. Posters for cultural events reveal a broad diversity of styles and also demonstrate how elements of the idiom of comics have developed a graphic autonomy.