Endi Poskovic

Endi Poskovic (born Elvedin Pošković, 1969, Sarajevo) is a Bosnian-American printmaker and educator whose monumental woodcut practice is one of the most ambitious in contemporary North American printmaking. He has been Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan's Stamps School of Art and Design since 2008.

Born in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (now Bosnia and Herzegovina) and raised in the Western Balkans, Poskovic spent his teenage and early adult years moving across multiple national contexts: he performed Western Balkans traditional music throughout Europe and the Middle East during the 1980s, then completed a Norwegian-government-sponsored scholarship year studying Nynorsk language and culture, and emigrated to the United States in 1991 amid the wars of Yugoslav succession. He completed an MFA at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1993, studying with Harvey Breverman and Adele Henderson, and has worked exclusively from a permanent base in the United States since.

His chosen primary medium is woodcut, although he has produced significant work in intaglio, lithography, monotype, and hybrid relief-painting techniques. His prints are typically large to monumental in scale — multiple-panel woodcuts ranging from a single 22 × 30 inch sheet up to five-panel compositions over twelve feet wide. The defining series of his recent career include Primavera (2021, five-panel woodcut, 54 × 150.5 inches, edition 8), Ruža / Rose (2020, three-panel, 54 × 87 inches), Gruda / Clod (2022, five-panel), Oblak / Cloud (2022, four-panel), Krilo / Wing (2021, four-panel), and Odora / Robe (2020, four-panel) — all titled in the artist's native Bosnian and structured as expansive multi-panel landscapes that combine personal cosmology, religious typology, and ancestral memory.

Poskovic's earlier mid-career body of work, executed in single-sheet 22 × 30 inch and slightly larger formats and issued in editions of 30–50, includes In The Western Land (Irréversible) (2005), Well Known Folly (¡QUÉ GUERRERO!) (2005–06), Sunny Day Over The Bay (l'impossibilité) (2007), The Night Watch in Green and Orange (l'éléphant) (2007), Three Craters (inséparable) (2007), Toy Mobile With Splash (PARODIA) (2007), They Spin Finally (sono tutti indispensibile) (2008), What a Sacrifice (La aventura continúa) (2008), In The Western Land (AHISTORICAL) (2008), Looking at the Sea (bobalicón) (2009), Death of a Painter (RUMOR DE LIMITES) (2010), Dream of My Own Country in Deep Blue with Red (2010), Winter Landscape with a Monument (2015), Čuvalo / Agony in the Garden (2016), and Hrabreni / O My Son, Beloved and Chosen (2017). The Spanish-language and Italian-language subtitles, the trans-European literary references, and the recurring 'In The Western Land' motif together register the artist's diasporic relationship to American place.

Aesthetically his prints invoke a distinctive blend of influences — early cinema, classical Japanese woodblock printing, Eastern European Constructivist and propaganda poster, and devotional religious typology. The colour fields are flat, broad, and saturated; the line carving is decisive; and the serial structuring of imagery across multi-panel surfaces produces a slowed-down narrative reading more characteristic of frescoed wall painting or storyboarded film than of the typical contemporary print object.