Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 at The Coningsby Gallery

Mirko Ilić, and the directors of SelfMadeHero and The Coningsby Gallery warmly invite you to Mirko's exhibition detailed below.

Graphic Novel Launch & Exhibition Private View: Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 by Mirko Ilić

Private View: Wednesday 2nd Sept 6pm - 8.30pm
Exhibition Opening Times: Tues 1st Sept - Mon 7th Sept 10.30am - 6.30pm (Closed Sun 6th Sept)

The Coningsby Gallery, 30 Tottenham Street, London, W1T 4RJ

In 2020, as his city and the world shut down around him, the acclaimed New York-based artist and graphic designer Mirko Ilić returned to his first love: drawing comics. With unprecedented time on his hands, he crafted a sequence of single-page stories to reflect the mood of those times – eventually naming his accumulated series in memory of 2020 AD – or rather (as a quite different sort of “AC Comic”) “A.C. 2020”.

Those initials stand for “After Covid”, because Ilić continued to create his intense visual essays even as the lockdowns slowly began to lift, channelling his inner anxieties and minute daily observations into a set of starkly surreal images that combine his unique personal imagination with the distilled inspiration of a lifetime’s influence – from Magritte to Moebius, Marshall McLuhan to Winsor McCay, Robert Crumb to Leonard Cohen.

Topped and tailed here by new appreciations from the legendary Steven Heller and Dave McKean, Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 builds into a unique picture of one man’s inner turmoil at a crumbling world. At once tender and disturbing, enthralling and liberating, its tragicomic pages stand as testament both to the stunning talent of their award-winning author and the universal circumstances he faced and overcame.

Spotlighting key pages and artworks from the book, this exhibition celebrates Ilić's long-awaited return to the comics form and invites you to explore the surreal world he created in response to the pandemic in 2020. The artworks lifted from the page and printed at large scale allow an enhanced appreciation of the book's captivating psychological landscape. Ilić's intensely personal and inventive imagery is a must-see! Several pieces will also be available to buy as high quality prints.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Mirko Ilić is a Bosnian-born comics artist and graphic designer based in New York. His formative years were spent in Communist-era Yugoslavia, where he became known for his early illustrations for comic books and magazines. His comics were then published internationally in Heavy Metal, Métal Hurlant, and Marvel’s Epic Illustrated, among others. Soon after moving to the United States, he became the art director of Timemagazine’s international edition and The New York Times’s op-ed pages.

Other highlights of Ilić’s illustrious career include designing album covers for Rage Against the Machine, creating the celebrated opening title sequence to You’ve Got Mail (1998), and enjoying collaborations with such luminaries as the legendary Milton Glaser and Steven Heller – including, most recently, on Milton Glaser: POP (The Monacelli Press, 2023). His works (including some of his comics) are in the collections of MoMA (New York), SFMOMA (San Francisco), the Smithsonian (Washington DC), Die Neue Sammlung (Munich), and many other globally renowned institutions.

Mirko Ilić: Fist to Face, a sumptuous retrospective of his life and work by Dejan Kršić, was published in New York in 2012 by Print Publishing. Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 (SelfMadeHero, 2026) is at once a disturbingly beautiful reflection on surviving the COVID pandemic and an unforgettable return to the visual medium of his first love: comics.

“Ilić’s comics are vivid and sublime descriptions of that range of emotions we have all experienced, and may continue to feel for considerable time still to come.” – Steven Heller

“It was a great pleasure to see such a powerful image-maker return to comics after many years as a master poster-maker, illustrator, designer – a ‘creativo’, as the Italians would say.” – Dave McKean