Peter Bankov — the school
artist
Peter Bankov
Two thousand and fifty-six posters, and Peter Bankov is still counting. He calls himself “a poster-making robot”, though the work reads nothing like it: expressive collage, type bruised on purpose, nothing polite. Born in Minsk in 1969 to a family of artists, he names his father, a painter who abandoned a career designing heavy machinery, as the influence he returns to first. He trained in sculpture at Minsk Art College, then in book design at a polygraphic institute, before settling in Prague. He is a member of AGI, the Alliance Graphique Internationale, and founded the design magazine [kAk); his posters now hang in MoMA, the Louvre and the Stedelijk.
The circuit has noticed: a Silver Medal at the 29th Warsaw International Poster Biennale in 2025 for “Kremuliator”, Jury Prizes at the Golden Bee biennale in 2014 and 2018, Gold at the Italian Poster Biennial in Finale Ligure in 2015, a Grand Prix in Seoul, and a Red Dot Award for “War No More”, pairing wartime poems with gouache portraits drawn from his own childhood memories of veterans. Steven Heller has featured him in both “Graphic: 500 Designs that Matter” and “Graphic Design Rants and Raves”; Bankov wrote his own account, “I Make Posters Every Day”, and Graphis profiled him as a Master under the heading “Design is Happiness”.
Five years ago he opened the Bankov Poster School in Prague; almost every artist in this Journal passed through it, proof that one teacher in one studio can set a visual vocabulary well past his own front door. In June 2025, twelve of its alumni put an anthology of motion posters up on the screens of Times Square, titled “No Clients. No Briefs. No Limits.”, a tribute to a teacher they credit with a love of aesthetics, a sense of humour, and the freedom to be weird. “To me, design is like meditation,” he has said. “The path is a hard one, but a happy one.”
Why we like it: a man who calls himself a poster-making robot has made 2,056 posters feel handmade, and then built a school to prove the trick can be taught.
