About

ISSO – International Serigraphy Symposium Ostrava is a long-term international project dedicated to the development, critical reflection, and presentation of serigraphy as an autonomous and still highly relevant graphic medium within the context of contemporary visual art.

The roots of the project date back to the second half of the 1990s, when Eduard Ovčáček and Zbyněk Janáčekestablished a specialised serigraphy studio at Ostrava University, specifically at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Ostrava–Mariánské Hory. From 1999 onwards, this studio gradually developed into one of the most important centres of serigraphy in the Czech Republic. This initiative was followed by a series of five editions of Serigraphy Workshop Ostrava (SWO), held between 1997 and 2001, which combined creative workshops, expert lectures, technological exchange, and systematic collection-building, while opening the medium of serigraphy to artists from various visual disciplines.

Building on the experience gained through SWO, ISSO – International Serigraphy Symposium Ostrava has been developing since 2013 the concept of a so-called permanent workshop. The project was initiated by Zbyněk Janáčekand Marek Sibinský and is realised in the reconstructed premises of the Faculty of Fine Arts, at the Department of Printmaking and Drawing. ISSO is not conceived as a time-limited event, but as a continuous platform closely integrated with teaching, research, and the exhibition programme of the faculty.

Since 2020, the serigraphy studio of the Faculty of Fine Arts has been significantly expanded and conceptually interconnected with the newly established

Centre for Digital Technologies, Faculty of Fine Arts, OU – (https://cdt.osu.cz), located in the new building of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Černá louka campus. This linkage of traditional graphic techniques with contemporary digital production and printing technologies creates a unique hybrid platform enabling experimental intersections between analogue and digital image-making, while substantially extending the technological, educational, and research capacities of the ISSO project.

An integral and indispensable part of the project has been long-term collaboration with professional printers, whose technical expertise and experience have significantly shaped both the artistic and educational quality of ISSO. A key role has been played by Stanislav Fuka and Luboš Dvořák, whose work ensured a high technological standard of the prints and enabled artists from diverse artistic backgrounds to fully explore the expressive and material possibilities of serigraphy. Their contribution exemplifies the essential dialogue between artistic intention and printing craftsmanship that lies at the very core of the medium.

To date, ISSO has brought together approximately 160 visual artists and educators from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and other European countries, as well as overseas. The workshops have resulted in a unique collection of more than 500 serigraphic works which, together with the earlier SWO holdings, represents an exceptional record of the development of serigraphy over the past three decades and constitutes the largest collection of serigraphy outside museum institutions in the Czech Republic.

ISSO consistently emphasises serigraphy as a medium grounded in the physical presence of colour—its layering, multiplication, and transformation through overprinting and glazing. These technological and material qualities make serigraphy an open and dynamic field of experimentation, accessible not only to trained printmakers but also to painters, sculptors, and artists from other areas of contemporary art.

Alongside workshops, ISSO is further developed through lectures, solo and group exhibitions, international collaborations, and systematic collection-building. As such, the project creates an open international forum for the exchange of experience, supports artistic education, and contributes to a broader critical discourse on the position of graphic art—and serigraphy in particular—within the contemporary visual arts.