On Thursday, 25 January, at 19:00hrs, HDD Gallery will open the exhibition of works by Boris Ljubičić, The Singularity of Plural – Symbol, Sign, Logo, Brand. The exhibition is part of the gallery program line “Designing History – History of Design” and presents a review of Ljubičić’s design work in the field of designing trademarks and logos of various institutions, companies, events and products in the time span from 1970 to date.
From the text by Marko Golub:
This exhibition is the third Ljubičić’s solo exhibition in HDD Gallery since 2011, all three initiated by the author and focused on various parts of his opus that covers more than four decades. The first, exhibition, named New Look Croatia (2011), presented a personal continuous design project of the integral visual identity of the Republic of Croatia, which manifested itself not only in the concept but also in numerous individual solutions. The second exhibition dealt in detail with the visual identity of the VIII Mediterranean Games in Split 1979 (2013) as a layered design project. If we were to exclude the recent big exhibition (which the author does not like to call a retrospective), held at the Museum of Arts and Crafts (2014), the only exhibition that is close to the previous two is “Just Posters”, which was organized in the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2013. That exhibition was concentrated on only one, the most traditional medium in design of visual communication. All of these exhibitions together, including this one that is conceptualized around the concepts of symbols, signs, logos, and brands, can be seen as Ljubičić’s unique autohistoric project, in which he as the author does not only seek his own (highly deserved) place in design history, but tries to articulate certain theses about design practice as such, about its values, priorities, methods, about what design means to him, and why it is important.
In the first part of the title of this exhibition we find an oxymoron – the Singularity of Plural – on which the author insists when he talks about the significance and reach of signs and logos, and their place not only in the wider context of the identity of an institution, company, brand or product, but also their very existence and transformation in time. We faced this in the preparations for this exhibition as well, trying to date some of the lesser-known examples (out of more than 250 of them), where we look at where and when they appear for the first time in a variety of applications, from packaging, posters, over adverts, to various other aspects of both internal and public and media presence. In other words, Ljubičić sees the sign and logo as perfect design artifacts – the most concise visual statements of a certain idea that connect all the meanings and values behind them. Unlike designing a poster or book cover, such a visual statement is, conditionally speaking, impersonal, and its further dissemination is usually not in the hands of its author, but it appears unchanged (singular…) in a potentially infinite number of applications, always in a dynamic correlation with the context in which it manifests itself (…plural).
Curator of the exhibition and author of texts: Marko Golub
Assistant curator: Monika Džakić
Graphic design: Boris Ljubičić and Monika Džakić
Print sponsors: Kvadrat i krug d.o.o., Cerovski print boutique, Ars kopija
Organizer of the exhibition: Hrvatsko dizajnersko društvo / HDD galerija
