Exhibition
Tomislav Mikulić: Digital Images and Animations 1971–2025
Nikola Tesla Technical Museum, Savska cesta 18 (Exhibition Hall)
14 January – 1 March 2026
Curator: Darko Fritz
The exhibition opening, attended by Tomislav Mikulić, will take place on Wednesday, 14 January at 7:00 p.m. at the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum, Savska cesta 18, Zagreb.
As part of the exhibition programme, on Thursday, 15 January at 5:30 p.m., Tomislav Mikulić will demonstrate the digital animation equipment (DAI PC) he used between 1981 and 1984, which he donated to the Museum.
About the exhibition:
This retrospective exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of more than five decades of work by one of the key pioneers of digital art in Croatia and within a broader international context. As noted by the exhibition curator Darko Fritz, Mikulić’s oeuvre emerges at a unique intersection of visual art and computer technology, shaped by his parallel education at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Zagreb. This background enabled him, already in the early 1970s, to develop a distinctive artistic language in a medium that was then still in its infancy.
The exhibition spans from early computer drawings produced on large mainframe computers and plotters, as well as algorithmic graphics presented at the Tendencies 5 exhibition in 1973 and internationally, through the first digital animations and computer-generated films in Croatia from the mid-1970s onward, to commissioned animations and television graphics. As emphasized by Darko Fritz, Mikulić consistently explores questions of movement, time, and image transformation. His early works already contain latent animation—“drawings in motion”—which would soon be realized in hybrid digital, film, and video media. The development of his own algorithms, such as morphing and digital fonts, further confirms his view of the computer as a creative system rather than merely a tool for reproduction.
Television occupies a particularly important place in his practice as the most influential mass medium of the second half of the 20th century. As the author of the first digital art film in Croatia (Random, 1975) and the long-time head of the TV Graphics Department at Television Zagreb, Mikulić decisively shaped the visual identity of national television programming—from animations for the evening news and shows such as Kviskoteka and Subotom uvečer, to the first animated Eurovision title sequence in 1979 and animations for the 1984 Winter Olympic Games in Sarajevo.
The exhibition also traces Mikulić’s ongoing reflection on formats for presenting digital art, ranging from gallery exhibitions and film screenings to television programmes that themselves become works of art. A particular value of the exhibition lies in the presentation of selected original hardware used by the artist in his work.
Alongside Mikulić’s own works, the exhibition includes objects from Tomislav Mikulić’s donation to the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum, materials from the Croatian School Museum—including equipment from the former Multimedia Centre of the University of Zagreb (MMC)—as well as artworks from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb.
Credits:
Organizer: Nikola Tesla Technical Museum
Project author and exhibition curator: Darko Fritz
Project manager at TMNT: Markita Franulić
Conservation: Goran Martinović, Jan Cerovečki, Franjo Strugar, Jan Mark Novalija
Exhibition design: Darko Fritz
Technical exhibition design and installation: Osvald exhibition design and technique
Technical setup of video works: Ivan Marušić Klif
