Igor Hofbauer

Igor Hofbauer was born in Zagreb in 1974. He lived his whole life in New Zagreb, to be precise. New Zagreb is a concrete skyscrapers suburb, I guess you can imagine the kind of place, since every big city has it. During Primary School he started making and selling badges and posters of Snoopy and, during his adolescence, he made several posters for Saturday school parties.
On such occasions, school directors usually allowed 15 to 20 minutes of punk and heavy metal music, thus he jumped in to draw posters for that kind of performances.
In High School he drew posters and photocopied themes for local bands; such works were strictly iconographical (punk, heavy metal, and hard core).
He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb for three years and, afterwards, he committed himself to designing and illustrating.
While he was studying at the Academy, he also studied and played drums. After some time, his love of performing and drawing posters overcame his desire to build a career as a painter and, therefore, he quitted the Academy. From that moment onwards, he made his living on illustration, doing non profitable business but doing exactly what he wanted: drawing comics, posters and books.
He was influenced mostly by music and films, whereas comics did not influence him for a long time, except the Friedman brother’s work, which he adored. Regarding films, there were three films that influenced him so much that he decided to draw some comics after seeing them. Fritz Lang’s “Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse”, Georges Franju’s “Les yeux sans visage” and Bela Tarr’s “Werckmeister Harmonies”.
His biggest music influence was the band This Heat, he always wanted to draw what they sound like. Igor Hofbauer is known among many fans of alternative music, since he had a great impact on club scene’s visual identity. His most famous work are posters and flyers for the club Mo?vara in Zagreb. He designed more than 100 posters for the club Mo?vara and other customers and friends in Europe and USA and at least 20 album covers for Croatian and foreign bands, too.

His work was also published in The Art of Modern Rock, a book that offers a selection of the finest rock posters in the last 50 years (Paul Gruschkin and Dennis King, 2004). The style of his posters and drawings is immediately recognisable, because it is based on a combination of classic American comics and film noir, pop art, German Expressionism, and Russian Constructivism, cleverly connected by the hand of a skilled designer.
In the last decade, Igor started drawing comic books. His inspiration are his neighbourhood, Novi Zagreb, the music, and the movies that affected him. In 2007 his first comic book Prison Stories was released by the publishing house from Zagreb Otompotom and from the Portuguese publishing house Chili Com Carne.
Later on, in 2009, his book of sketches Firma, was published.
He has collaborated with Croatian fiction writer Edo Popovi? on several illustrated books that were published in Croatia and Germany. During his residence in Studio Azil he started drawing his comic book Mister Morgen, which was printed in French by the publisher L’Association in 2016 and in English from the Canadian publisher Conundrum in 2017. The main scene takes place in Novi Zagreb and its characters are elder inhabitants living in block of flats. The lives of the elders, which he meets in the elevator or in the corridor, fire his imagination. He is not interested in the topic of apathy and the real world, but it is the world of dreams that fascinate him. In the world of dreams people and places known to us are completely different than in reality, yet we can identify them without difficulties.
In 2015 Hofbauer was invited by Museums Quartier Wien to take part to the Q21 Residence Programme; the successful result of this experience was the comic book Inspektor Gurtel, published in 2016.
Recently, Igor has started working on his new book.
Igor Hofbauer’s work stretches across wide designs areas. As a set designer, he has worked on various theatre plays and for the Croatian National Television - HRT - where he was the author of the scenography for the popular teenage TV show Briljanteen. Hofbauer has designed numerous posters, cd/vinyl covers and book illustrations. He has also collaborated with different magazines, drawing comics as well as illustrations.