Igor Gurović is a graphic designer who has won many prestigious design and graphic awards and is a member of the AGI International Club (Alliance Graphique Internationale). In 2002, he and Eric Belousov and Anna Naumova founded Ostengruppe in 2012 with Natalia Agapova, Arbeitskollektiv. Igor Gurović has an ingenious, paradoxical style that is clever, sometimes ironically interpreting the elements of graphic design, giving them spice and freshness. In this interview, we spoke to Igor about the creative way, the genre, and the language of the poster, the education, and the tapestry.

I started studying in the Soviet Union. At that time, the institutions, especially the arts, had interest rates for Jews. I really wanted to be an artist-- painting. But going to Surikovsky, the polygraph, or the same painting at Stroganovka, I had almost no chance. But it turns out the car designer at Stroganovka is pretty good: it was the crapiest specialty, the smallest competition at the institute. It was a tactical move to at least do it! As a result, the desire to paint cars was taken away by the university itself, as was much more. And I started making posters for little theater studios.

At the same time, I grew up on books about the Czech and Polish poster. The Stroganovka Library had these books seen before the hole (the books on the Soviet poster were like new books, no one saw them). We didn’t see the Americans, we didn’t see the French, but we did see the Poles. And it’s very important because there was a great Henrik Tomaszewsky who brought a bad composition to the poster. That’s how he taught the students: you make 100 sketches, and the worst of them are the best. He also provoked students into low-tech tools: paper fragments, spit, butts. His students were told that they were climbing the dumpsters looking for tools for their sheets.

I really wanted to make posters, and it was very important. My father, who was friends with one of the artists of Agitplakat, brought me there. They paid 150 rubles for the poster, and it was a lot of money. The artists of «Sovexportfilm» went there to collect the fees, and there were the best posters in the USSR — posters for films that were bought for sale abroad. The Soviet man never saw them, they were seen by Americans, French, others, for whom it was possible to make good posters and not for their own. There were great people working there: Igor Mystrovsky, Alexander Chantsev, Yuri Boxer… I was 20 years old, I was a little, stupid, arrogant, very bad artist. And they adopted me for some reason. I didn’t get the job, but I talked to him, and it was the best school.

The Hud Council began at two o’clock in the afternoon; I came with sketches, showed them, and made it back to the institute. Mysterovsky and Boxer: «Did you bring this to the Council? Let’s go back and do the right thing. Or else we will be ashamed.» I had some anger and tenacity in me, went away, remodeled, and I brought it back. It’s awfully pathetic the unpaid fees, but it was the best thing that could happen to me. That’s where I realized once and for all that you can’t screw up for money. Nobody’s immune to a job that doesn’t work, but you can’t start doing something with the feeling that you’re doing shit for money. Like, now I’m gonna make a lot of money on this, and then I’m gonna do the beauty thing. It never happens!

Posters have changed since Soviet power ceased to exist. It’s got a lot of things to do with it. First of all, it’s a picture and lives by the law of monumental art. And the poster is a storitelling, and it has its own storytelling and mythology. The first thing that’s changed is the storytelling. The best-painted main heroes with a big Soviet jaw and a wolf-eyed look, who look somewhere and don’t see anything. Cats, cowboys, and dollars showed up, sad people came along. Suddenly there was a life. The plaque spoke in the human language.

I’ve been doing and still making posters for the Dom Cultural Center for years. Why, for him, is because he was almost the first person to speak to the citizens in an attempt to engage in dialogue with them. There is a tradition of telling stories, and the huge problem is that this tradition is going away. And in every job we tried to tell a story. And if you want to tell her, you need to get attention. Call, come here! And then again, we have a story for you. If the posters were quiet and modest, no one would notice them. Placard is the thing about the temperament of the yard. It’s probably the most emotional and creative genre. In countries where a private voice is important, the poster culture will never disappear. Where the job is to make the place talkable, intelligent, informative, friendly, nothing happens to the poster. Where there’s no problem, he dies.

I’m still making theater posters. The theatre poster can be either an ally and equal or a waiter’s ritual. Lots of directors want a waitress ritual. And then this ritual, which isn’t always clear, hits the street; it has 7 to 20 seconds tops — and what do I do in these seconds what the director does? I can’t be exact in a restatement. So you don’t have to tell me, you have to tell your story, which is inspired by what’s in the play. It’s one strategy for a theater poster. And there’s, say, a Dutch and Swiss strategy: buy a ticket and go to the show, and we can only warn you that there’s something like this going on in the theater, we can cut a style culture and we can make a vague promise of happiness.

I have some status ad hoc jobs I don’t like very much, but I know I should probably talk about them. For example, a poster for the World Cup in Russia. I’ve done it with pleasure: football is important to me, I’ve played it all my childhood, and my relatives have watched it on TV. A huge piece of life, one of the most important national codes. But since it’s such a very official thing, it’s been going on for, like, two years. And in two years, the Swiss killed everything alive that could have been there.

Today, all divisions with old names have become quite conditional. Good designers move easily into art, good artists move easily into design. The same thing about learning a profession: a designer doesn’t have to learn from a designer, a cook from a cook. They learn from smart people. Everyone I love and respect in design has one important thing in common: they’re non-lazy people and they’re terribly curious. Things change, and if you miss the upgrade one day, you’ll never get back on track. And you have to understand that an upgrade is a whole set of technology and ideas. It is not for fear that something should be missed: the very idea of rapid change is important. You have to take a small step forward: if you don’t go forward, you’re going back.

In 2012, a friend of mine called and said, «There’s an offer to organize a design school. I think this school should be different than everyone else. And if we — me, you, other people — come up with a new education, I’ll do it.» It was a great experiment — human and professional; we went and invented this new education for a year. If I’d been asked to teach, I’m not sure if I’d agreed or not, and that was a real challenge. And it’s clear that when we came up with all this, there was no going back.

Here’s what I’m saying to the students today: it’s a happy time for the profession, because design is in almost every sphere of life. There are a lot of things that the old workshops have not been apropriated, a lot of gray areas that don’t even know who they’re supposed to be. Architect or designer? Cinematographer or designer? The editor or the designer again? There’s a lot of professional zones that are at the intersection of specialties, and all the biggest fees lie exactly at those intersections. I teach them to look at the world with their eyes open, to try to analyze everything, to understand what the weaknesses of the world are and how these flaws can be turned into positives. 'Cause it’s all wrong, and you can do it smart, right, and useful.

The Gobelens are my diary records. It’s kind of a travel note. Trying to apologise new cultural codes, new composite schemes, new stories born of new places and new impressions. Many years ago, in a poster, I began to engage in various ways of degradation of the image. And now carpeting is my favorite way. The cover of a boxing magazine from the 1960s and the 14th — century Persian miniatur are common style features — this is remarkable!

Material produced by Artem Lipatov on the cover, a piece of poster for the DOM cultural centre, 2018