Karel Martens is a Dutch designer and teacher. After training at the school of art in Arnhem, he has worked as a freelance graphic designer, specializing in typography. Alongside this, he has always made free (non-commissioned) graphic and three-dimensional work. His design work ranges widely, from postage stamps, to books, to signs on buildings. All this work is documented and celebrated in the books Karel Martens: drukwerk / printed matter and Karel Martens: counterprint. Martens has taught graphic design since 1977. His first appointment was at the school of art at Arnhem (until 1994). He was then attached to the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (1994–9). From 1997 he has been a visiting lecturer in the graphic design department at the School of Art, Yale University. In that year, together with Wigger Bierma, he started a pioneering school of postgraduate education within the ArtEZ, Arnhem – the Werkplaats Typografie – where he still teaches.
Karel Martens with Paul Elliman & Carel Kuitenbrouwer
Now that stocks of Karel Martens: printed matter are exhausted, we have published a short book that shows some of the uncommissioned printed work of Martens, with an essay on ‘The world as a printing surface’ by Elliman. This is very much an object-book, in which the work is not so much reproduced as bodied forth.
| £17.50 |
