Gurovich's workshop
Nelli Kamaeva
Poster
Posters from Igor Gurovich's "Searching for a Hero" workshop — a Hero of Our Time theatre poster found on the street before it was designed.
These posters came out of a workshop with Igor Gurovich called Searching for a Hero. The method was deliberately analogue at the start: go into the city, observe, collect visual material off the streets, and only then shape it into an image with hand work and digital tools. The hero had to be found before it could be designed.
My poster landed on a theatre production — A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov, directed by Vladimir Shcherban at the Arcola Theatre. One version is almost entirely dark, a near-black field with a single pale curl of birch bark glowing low on the sheet and the cast list whispered in faint blue, beside Lermontov's line "Was I put on this earth to destroy the hopes of others?"; a second flips to high-contrast RGB, the same torn-paper mountain split into red, green and blue channels.
The workshop was really about restraint — finding one true image and trusting it to carry the weight, instead of decorating the page.
Igor Gurovich is one of the most influential figures in contemporary poster design — co-founder of the studio Ostengruppe and a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale).
Links & coverage. Official: Ostengruppe — http://www.ostengruppe.com/ · Igor Gurovich — https://www.instagram.com/guronpics/ · AGI profile — https://a-g-i.org/user/igorgurovich/.
These posters came out of a workshop with Igor Gurovich called Searching for a Hero. The method was deliberately analogue at the start: go into the city, observe, collect visual material off the streets, and only then shape it into an image with hand work and digital tools. The hero had to be found before it could be designed.
My poster landed on a theatre production — A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov, directed by Vladimir Shcherban at the Arcola Theatre. One version is almost entirely dark, a near-black field with a single pale curl of birch bark glowing low on the sheet and the cast list whispered in faint blue, beside Lermontov's line "Was I put on this earth to destroy the hopes of others?"; a second flips to high-contrast RGB, the same torn-paper mountain split into red, green and blue channels.
The workshop was really about restraint — finding one true image and trusting it to carry the weight, instead of decorating the page.
Igor Gurovich is one of the most influential figures in contemporary poster design — co-founder of the studio Ostengruppe and a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale).
Links & coverage. Official: Ostengruppe — http://www.ostengruppe.com/ · Igor Gurovich — https://www.instagram.com/guronpics/ · AGI profile — https://a-g-i.org/user/igorgurovich/.
Gurovich's workshop
Nelli Kamaeva
