Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 an exhibition by Mirko Ilić
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Opening Times
Tues 1st Sept - Mon 7th Sept 10.30am - 6.30pm (Closed Sun 6th Sept)
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.
SelfMadeHero aim to publish ground-breaking and beautiful work by authors and artists from across the globe, from the quirky and humorous to the political and profound. We are proud to bring readers graphic novels and visual narratives that provoke, entertain, inspire, and inform.
Releases for 2026 include: Barbara Yelin’s Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory, ILYA’s Romo the WolfBoy, Joann Sfar’s The Little Prince, Kay Medaglia’s Comic Therapy: Meditations for Reflection, Myfanwy Tristram’s Noisy Valley: The Art of Protest, Ivo van Woerden, Gemma Plum and Marloes Dekkers’ The Great Marc Evers,Mirko Ilić’s Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020, Bryan and Mary Talbot’s Lo! An Amazon!, and Simon Elliott’s Chagall.