The seventh edition of the Melba Design Festival is hosting an exhibition featuring a series of posters by contemporary Ukrainian illustrators, curated by Anna Sarvira (Ukraine). The series of posters is part of the archive of the Ukrainian Pictoric collective — a community of contemporary Ukrainian illustrators and graphic designers who gather and create illustrations, posters, and comics that comment on the situation in Ukraine with inspiring messages of hope, freedom, and equal rights.
The exhibition interprets the impact of the war not only on daily life but also on culture, ecology, education, and human rights. The powerful visual narrative of Pictoric represents a gesture of solidarity and provokes thought, countering the growing apathy that results from the daily barrage of war news.
Pictoric Illustrators Club was founded in 2014 by Oleg Gryshchenko, Olena Staranchuk, and Anna Sarvira. With the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, Pictoric launched the project #SupportUkrainePIC, which collects and presents illustrations by Ukrainian artists sharing scenes from everyday life against the threatening backdrop of war. Since then, Pictoric has organized over 40 exhibitions in museums, galleries, libraries, and urban spaces around the world, including in New York, Ottawa, Paris, Florence, Utrecht, and more. In early November 2024, an exhibition by the Ukrainian collective will be presented for the first time in Bulgaria as part of the Melba Design Festival in Sofia.
About Anna Sarvira, exhibition’s curator
Anna Sarvira (1986, Ukraine) is an illustrator, curator, and art director, co-founder of the Pictoric Illustrators Club (2014), from Kyiv, Ukraine, currently living in Cologne, Germany. Having graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv, her graphic works and illustrations have been awarded and exhibited worldwide including the Itabashi Museum in Tokyo, the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, and the Pictoplasma Conference in Berlin. She worked with international organizations such as UNICEF, Museum of Modern Art New York, Goethe Institute, British Council, UN Women, Coca Cola, Penguin Books, and many more.
