Visiting artist lecture March 18

Sarajevo-born artist Endi Poskovic, educated in Norway and the U.S. and best-known for his large-scale color woodcuts, is a visiting artist in the School of Art through March 18. He will work with students in the intaglio classroom creating a woodblock print. He also will be exhibiting and discussing his original work.

Poskovic will deliver a public lecture on his work at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 18, in room 145 of the Center for the Visual Arts. Admission is free and open to the public.

Poskovic’s graphic work reflects the strategies of classic ukiyo-e block prints, early cinema, devotional pictures and Eastern European propaganda posters by merging visual representation with text, often shifting the reading of the imagery through continuous representation and re-contextualization. His amalgam of diverse imagery and visual narratives imply accounts from personal and social histories and reference themes of cultural and environmental shifts, migration and alienation that are at once magnificent and dystopian.

Born in the former Republic of Yugoslavia, Poskovic holds his graduate degree in print media from State University of New York at Buffalo. Widely exhibited and best known for his large-scale color woodcuts, Poskovic has represented the U.S. in virtually all major international print biennials and triennials. He is the recipient of over 70 grants, and his works are in numerous museum and public collections in the U.S. and abroad.

Since 2008, Poskovic has been teaching at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor School of Art and Design and is a faculty associate in the University of Michigan’s Center for Russian and East European Studies, and the Center for European Studies.

Ukiyo-e prints are a genre of Japanese woodblock prints (or woodcuts) and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre and pleasure quarters. It is the main artistic genre of woodblock printing in Japan.

Next article: U Club features Andrew Huot on March 19