In the fall of 2009, Belgrade will host a large exhibition dedicated to the 60th anniversary of Serbia's printmakers and graphic designers collective - the Grafićki Kolektiv - one of Southeastern Europe's most renowned and influential establishments in this field of visual arts.

The Grafićki Kolektiv and its Belgrade gallery were founded in 1949 by the first generation of graphic artists to graduate from Belgrade's Academy of Visual Arts: Boško Karanović, Mirjana Mihać, Dragoslav Stojanović Sip, Dragoljub Kazić and Mile Petrović, all of whom studied under Mihailo S. Petrov, the founder of modern Serbian graphic arts.

For six decades this eminent institution has been dedicated to collecting and displaying the most significant works of leading printmakers and graphic artists from Serbia, the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the world.

"The Grafićki Kolektiv is an active and resilient institution, with firm professional standards. We have never - not even during the 1990s when our operation was most difficult due to a lack of financing - made compromises regarding our program, but have adhered to serious professional criteria," says Ljiljana Cinkul, the program director of the Grafićki Kolektiv Gallery for the Southeast Europe: People and Culture.

According to her, the co-operative's collection contains several thousand works by the most eminent Yugoslav graphic artists and by many artists from across the world. "The Grafićki Kolektiv keeps up with the times and nurtures not only classical graphic arts forms and artists who have become part of graphics history, but newcomers and new ideas as well: a show of works of young artist Sejma Prodanović will soon open at the gallery, and after that we will be displaying the works of young graphic artist Nikola Korać, who uses his comic book drawing experience in his work; clearly a completely new style and new generation," said Cinkul.

Cinkul explains that the Grafićki Kolektiv always followed current developments and new media in the field of graphic arts, such as digital graphics, the video-beam as a way of presenting works, and other forms of artistic expression.

Last year, the Kolektiv's gallery exhibited photographs by famous UK art historian Edward Lucie-Smith. There is virtually no relevant artist from former Yugoslavia who has not displayed his or her works at the gallery. The Grafićki Kolektiv Gallery has also housed the works of world masters such as Salvador Dali and Marc Chagall, Czech graphic artist Jiri Anderle, as well as Albin Brunovsky, the master of small graphic forms.

The Kolektiv will be celebrating its anniversary with a series of events, including two large exhibitions. An exhibition entitled "The Beginnings of Modern Graphic Design in Serbia (1950-1970)", opened just recently in June, and was prepared by art historian Gordana Popović-Vasić.

The goal of this exhibition is to present works in graphic design -- i.e. posters, books, symbols and other works from the field - created between 1950 and 1970, and to illustrate the emergence of a new attitude toward this applied art form in Serbia.

According to the exhibition's author, the period in question is important because it is during this time, in 1970, that graphic artists moved away from Socialist Realism and founded the Students' Cultural Center in Belgrade.

"The exhibition is accompanied by a serious publication, based on which a monograph will be prepared next year. The period dealt with was a time before computers, a time when not even television was dominant, when there were no billboards, but when posters and other printed promotional materials were used instead," Ljiljana Cinkul explains.

The posters displayed mostly come from the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts, but material for the exhibition was also gathered from the National Library and State Archives, the Belgrade University Library and Belgrade City Archives, as well as from private collections.

For the fall of 2009, Cinkul has announced a large exhibition of works from the Grafićki Kolektiv's collection, which will most likely be staged at the Heritage House in Belgrade, and which will serve as a kind of testimony to six decade's of the Collective's work.

A two-day seminar entitled "Graphics on the edge -- graphic arts and its border areas in the 21st century" was held in late May, also on occasion of the Collective's 60th anniversary, and was attended by leading regional and European experts in the field.

The speakers included U.K. theoretician Richard Noyce, the author of numerous articles on modern art as well as of the book "Printmaking at the Edge" (2006, 2008), in which he discussed graphic arts trends and border regions for modern visual arts through sample works by 43 graphic artists from 27 countries.

Among the Grafićki Kolektiv's significant activities are its traditional May exhibition of works by the Belgrade Circle, its Small Graphics exhibition, the Griffin Competition for the best work in graphic design, launched in 1996, and awarding of the national graphics prizes: the Great and Little Seal.