Graphic Design & Typography
Unbound accompanies Karel Martens’ first solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, bringing together a wide-ranging body of work Karel made and collected over the entire span of his decades long career. Containing works from the show, collaged, overprinted and juxtaposed with elements found around his studio, the book balances between being an artist book and a catalog. “This publication, thoughtfully designed by Jordi de Vetten and Susu Lee in close collaboration with Martens himself, functions as a handbook to his work. But it’s an unconventional one: unstructured, non-hierarchical, playful, personal, and associative.” With texts by Thomas Castro, curator of the exhibition and Rein Wolfs, director of the Stedelijk Museum.
This issue is devoted to the Italian designer, artist, and inventor Bruno Munari, whose visual experiments were so iconic as to become a self-evident part of visual culture. At its core is the first English translation of ‘Obvious Code’ (1971), a collection of Munari’s own writings, sketches, and poems about his work. It includes iconic design objects such as the Abitacolo, groundbreaking artworks like his series of handmade projection slides, obscure rhymes about the art market, and an original piece from his “unreadable books” series. Dozens of artists, designers, writers, and curators were invited to annotate Munari’s texts as a testament to the depth of his influence on international art.
This artist’s publication contains a sequence of unique letterpress monoprints, made by Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens between 2014 and 2022. The prints, which are both highly geometric and brightly coloured, are reproduced in the book at their actual size. Textual elements accent the various abstract shapes and repetitions on almost every page. ‘Small Prints’ is available in two different cover versions, which itself is the result of a printing experiment. By printing the contents of the book in three layers on a single print sheet, which was then cut and folded, variations in the cover emerged.
Learning from the inscription in the courtyard of the Ducal Palace of Urbino, typeface designer Radim Peško considers different approaches based on the original letterforms from the Renaissance. This leads to experimentation with technologies, using different methods, and constructing new typefaces to not only demonstrate the resulting fonts but also give context to their origins. The publication features texts by Peško alongside contributions by Francesco Delrosso, Stuart Bertolotti Bailey, James Langdon, Daniele Bursich, and Jonathan Pierini. Designed by Peško and Pierini.
A tear-off calendar for 2026 by Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens. For each day of the year, Martens has created a unique arrangement, originally constructed using his signature method of printing letterpress monoprints from found metal forms, and then digitized to comprise 365 compositions in total. Every day is a new day!
‘Love Letters’ is a selection of 46 envelopes for the letters that Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens sent to his love, Lous, between 1962 and 1963. The envelopes were all manually crafted using printing ink and a spoon to create the pattern. They were printed during his military service, when he was stationed in the drawing room of the Welfare Service at the Prins Hendrik Barracks. Among other things, there he was tasked with designing a poster titled “Don’t croak about military service matters, the enemy is listening”.
This publication is a catalogue of all the material published up until 2022 by ROMA Publications, founded in Amsterdam in 1998 by Roger Willems, Mark Manders, and Marc Nagtzaam. It appears with the exhibition ‘One can build a table for 425 books’ at Sitterwerk and contains a selection of photographs made between 2001 and 2021 by fellow designer and studio mate Hans Gremmen. As Roland Früh, head of the art library at Sitterwerk, suggests in the preface, “None of the 425 books listed here stand out because they want to; they’re not shining with metallic ink, they’re not oversized, not heavy or loud or shrill. But they radiate something that makes them special.”
Updated reprint in black of a book featuring a collection of Na Kim’s work from 2006 to 2015 published on the occasion of her fourth solo exhibition, SET (named after this publication) at DOOSAN Gallery New York, from October 8 to November 5, 2015. For this book, fragments of her works are set in more or less personal categories, taking on a form reminiscent of a sample book. In contrast with the first edition, published before the show’s opening, this book also contains images of the actual exhibition and a text by Jae Seok Kim.
A set of 12 postcards by Karel Martens, published to accompany the first major retrospective exhibition at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Experimental Jetset’s second volume in its self-reflective series is an inquiry into the role of the city as an infrastructure for language and vice versa, seen through the lens of four significant movements: Constructivism, Situationist International, Provo, and Post-Punk. Emerging from a research project and exhibition by the design studio, the book features extensive footnotes by 20 guest authors, including Linda van Deursen, Owen Hatherley, Adam Pendleton, Simon Reynolds, Lori Waxman, Mimi Zeiger, and others. An added bonus: it comes with a 26-page zine, zooming in on the design typology of the original exhibition.
From the 1960s, Croatian artist Julije Knifer (1924–2004) painted stark, snaking, geometric lines that he called meanders. The monotony and absurdity of this practice, and journaling about his non-progress every day, was for Knifer “a very specific form of freedom”. Each painting was not a whole, but part of a larger stream. This edition of ‘The Serving Library Annual’ explores this theme, where the meander offers both the promise of continuity and the mixed blessing of recurrence. Its freely wandering contents include contributions by Julije Knifer, Anuja Dhir and Ab Rogers, Anthony Huberman, Yuji Agematsu, Tauba Auerbach, Emilie M. Reed, Lauren Elkin, and others.
This book is an exhibition. The pages can be arranged in sequence on a wall, creating a site-specific installation of 340 individual images over 21 square meters. Distributed in a limited edition of 750 copies, Martens invites participation in the transformation of the book as an object and the movement of the exhibition through time and space. You can use this book as your own statement. Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Karel Martens: Re-Production at IS A GALLERY in Shanghai, curated by Zhongkai Li. Design: Karel & Aagje Martens.
Four years after 'Statement and Counter-Statement' (2015), Experimental Jetset returns with their second paperback for Roma Publications. Whereas the previous publication had a more overall monographic scope, 'Full Scale False Scale' focuses on a single project: the large, site-specific installation that the studio recently created for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, commissioned to coincide with the museum’s reopening in October 2019. Part reader, part collage, the book forms a subjective archive of research material, just as constructed as the installation itself – an investigation that took them from esoteric colour theories to dark political alliances, and from modernist diagonals to postmodern arches.
A room full of colours! Renowned for his inventiveness, and his playful and experimental approach, Karel Martens is also resourceful, able to accomplish a lot with very little. Selected from 216 variations, this hand-picked unique set of twelve A4 sheets can be composed as wallpaper. A special edition release, the sets are released on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Karel Martens – Unbound’ at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the first major retrospective of one of the most influential post-war graphic designers of the Netherlands.
Karel Martens occupies an intriguing place in the current European landscape of art and design. His work is both personal and experimental, but also publicly answerable. Martens, a prolific book designer, has also contributed to a wide range of design commissions, including stamps, coins, and signs. His artistic practice is intimately connected with this design work, from geometric and kinetic constructions, to works on paper and monoprints. Covering almost 60 years of practice and now in its fourth edition, this book offers new ways to look at and discuss the output of this designer and artist, and is offered in the same spirit of experiment and dialogue that characterises the work it presents.