No matter the format, the work of Dunja Janković reveals her closeness to print. She makes work across many disciplines; illustration, graphic design, architecture and art, and the end results vary – anything from books and collages to wearable objects and installations. In Janković’s Things that Block the View (2020), a striking artist’s book, she used paper, abstract geometry and sequencing to explore alternative storytelling, inviting the reader to participate in the process.
Within the book, pattern, form and colour parade non-specified objects that hang in the page frame or shapes that repeat and fracture. Digital vectors are diffused by the grainy Riso print on rough paper stock, avoiding hard edges. Shapes repeat and guide the eye through the book’s unpredictable pages. Duplication and iteration is core to Janković’s method of working – everything is a testing ground. She describes her books as ‘my little gardens where I can grow and cultivate a variety of images’ and uses the process of printmaking to ‘go into any possible direction, either as versions of the same image on the surface of the paper, or as a module …’.
Janković studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia and at the SVA (School of Visual Arts) in New York. She now lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. Her book Camouflage has just been published by 3ge3 books (China). There is a connection between the visual history of geometric form and the practice of graphic design – from Hilma A. F. Klint and the Bauhaus grammar of ‘triangle, circle and square’. The blend of simple shape and colour tells of something more sensory and more truthful.
cargocollective.com/dunjajankovic
Things That Block the View
Year: 2020
Published by: Look Back and Laugh (Ljublijana)
Print: Riso Paradiso
Paper: Fedrigoni Arcoprint Edizioni 120g/m2