Oliver Pilić

In June 2024, Oliver Pilić conceived four new series of prints at the MGLC Print Studio in his characteristic and well recognisable style based on the combining of the traditional woodcut technique and new digital technologies and tools.

The series of woodcuts titled The Extension of Time most plastically shows the artist’s manipulation of a chosen photo for the preparation of the matrix, first, in the context of the physical impact of pulling on the process of scanning and, later, by changing the size of the photo from a small one to an almost extremely large one, which essentially affects the understanding of the image. Pilić is a passionate collector of media images of various contents that visualise a certain socio-political background and present different topics, with the graphic or narrative features of the photos being of essential importance. In his series Sequence #1 to #8, he follows minimal changes in the image, which is reminiscent of the conception of an animated film or a video sequence of a particular shot. What is foregrounded in this context is thus not his selection of the photo but his focus on a particular video clip, which is recaptured in eight sequences in the prints. In the Mediteraneo series, the artist played with the idea of printing CMYK in woodcut, which is a demanding endeavour, especially if we consider that he manually cut the matrix for each of the four colours. He achieved a graphically and substantively satisfactory print effect already after printing two colours, which led him to the idea of printing the CMYK four-colour printing in silkscreen. In the resulting series titled Untitled, he replaced his recognisable vertical raster with a dotted one and thereby also formally realised his conceptual design.