825th stamp blog: Karel Martens – Unbound in Amsterdam

Last chance until October 26, 2025. On the first floor of the museum, you walk into the largest hall. It is set up as Karel Martens' studio, complete with shelving, and his designs also hang on the wall. This is the first overview of Karel Martens, one of the most important post-war Dutch graphic designers, known for his individuality and his playful and experimental way of working. Karel Martens has trained and inspired generations of younger designers in the Netherlands and internationally. The exhibition is a journey of discovery through the oeuvre Martens built up over 65 years – from his adventurous lettering on buildings to books, typography, stamps, telephone cards, and wallpaper.

Karel Martens – Unbound

The first retrospective of Karel Martens (1939), one of the most important post-war Dutch graphic designers, known for his individuality and his playful and experimental way of working. Karel Martens has trained and inspired generations of younger designers in the Netherlands and internationally. The exhibition is a journey of discovery through the oeuvre that Martens built up over 65 years – from his adventurous lettering on buildings to books, typography, stamps, telephone cards, and wallpaper.

Dutch graphic design is held in very high regard internationally. Emerging from a modernist tradition, with predecessors such as Piet Zwart, HW Werkman, and Willem Sandberg, Karel Martens, Wim Crouwel, and Jan van Toorn formed the Big Three in the field of graphic design from the 1960s onwards. While Wim Crouwel was known for his functional grid, subservient to the content, and Jan van Toorn displayed his activist and personal approach, Karel Martens, as an experimental, autonomous maker, has also completely changed the way we view design, book design, and typography.

For Martens, it is about thinking, looking, and experimenting: “I love tinkering, trying something, doubting, starting over.” Martens plays with color systems, numbers, word schemes, and algorithms, where one arises from the other. He often applies bright areas of color in layers on top of one another and works both digitally and analogously.

Martens is also an inventive explorer; when it comes to the budget, he makes a virtue of necessity. He avoids waste and uses, among other things, newspaper paper and old archive cards from the Stedelijk Museum. He deviates freely from design conventions; for instance, the text can begin on the cover or be placed in the margins. His experiments went furthest in the design of the architecture magazine OASE: every edition is different. He initially shaped it together with students from Werkplaats Typografie, which he co-founded, and nowadays with his daughter Aagje Martens.

Since Karel Martens began collaborating with his children Klaartje and Diederik in 2019 under the name Martens & Martens, the scope of work has broadened to include textiles and collaborations, such as with Suite702, which produces towels based on Martens' color system for the beach houses in Le Havre. Martens' designs have also been incorporated into textile designs for Liberty London, Maharam, Hermès, DUM, Pop Trading Company, and Pentagram, among others. The table that Martens designed for Werkplaats Typografie in 1998 is now part of the Functionals collection.   Exhibition as a journey of discovery With more than 300 works, the exhibition is a journey of discovery through the rich oeuvre of Karel Martens. A complete overview of his adventurous lettering for buildings is on display, such as that for the Nederlands Danstheater in The Hague, as well as all issues of OASE, and books, typography, and stamps designed by him. phone cards and wallpaper. One of his beach houses has also been recreated, part of Couleurs sur la plage in Le Havre (2017), featuring a color system that Martens based via algorithms on the city's founding document from 1517. The Icon Viewer developed by him converts live images into Martens' icon pixels via a large screen; in the same room, the road surface design he created for Amsterdam in 2024 to make the 30 km/h speed limit visible and tangible is also on display.

The layout provides an impression of Martens' studio, featuring a wall with collected objects and images showing what inspires him, and shelving units with his many designs. For the first time, thanks to countless sketches from his archive, Martens' research and design process is also visible. At the reading table designed by Martens, it is possible to browse through his designs endlessly; in the film room, the designer himself can be seen at work, and designers inspired by him share their thoughts.   Pricing Karel Martens was awarded many prizes for his groundbreaking work, such as the BNO Piet Zwart Prize (2023), the HN Werkman Prize (1993), the Dr. AH Heineken Prize for the Arts (1996), and the Gerrit Noordzij Prize (2012). His self-designed oeuvre publication Printed Matter, published in conjunction with the Heineken Prize, was awarded a gold medal at the Leipzig Book Fair in 1998 as the best-designed book of that year.

  Collections and exhibitions The work of Karel Martens received international attention in media such as the New York Times and the authoritative American trade journal Emigre. Museums such as SFMOMA (San Francisco) and The Art Institute of Chicago included his works in their collections. Solo exhibitions abroad took place at Ginza Graphic Gallery Tokyo (2013), P! New York City (2016), Kunstverein Munich (2017), 019 Ghent (2017), and Platform-L in Seoul, South Korea (2018/2019). The Stedelijk Museum showed the work of Karel Martens in shows such as *Mooi maar goed – Grafisch ontwerpen in Nederland 1987-1998* (1999), *Werkplaats Typografie* (2002), and in various editions of *De Best Verzorgde Boeken* and the Municipal Art Acquisitions.  

  Source: Stedelijk.nl  

<strong> More info: </strong>

Karel Martens – Unbound, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, through October 26, 2025: https://www.stedelijk.nl/nl/tentoonstellingen/karel-martens Review Karel Martens – Unbound: https://museumtijdschrift.nl/artikelen/recensies/onbegrensd-karel-martens-stedelijk-museum-amsterdam-in-kleur-en-ritme/ Martens & Martens: https://martens-martens.com/ Previous museum blogs: https://www.postzegelblog.nl/tag/made-in-holland/