CAC Reading Room, Vilnius
Friday February 17, 7pm
Karel Martens has ten hands for every finger, and he’s kept them full for over 50 years. Artist, typographer, graphic designer, industrial designer, bookmaker, educator – Martens produces relentlessly, and his project Motion brings the full range of that production into view through an exhibition of new and existing works at Kunstverein München in Munich, Germany, a new 304-page publication (designed with Julie Peeters and co-produced by Roma Publications), and a series of corresponding events at San Serriffe in Amsterdam, CAC Reading Room in Vilnius, Section 7 in Paris, and P! in New York.
Martens experiments. And yet his methodical and responsive tests in color, type, printing processes, and formats generate precise visual effects. With a penchant for simplicity, his work frequently deploys a limited set of elements that are repeated and combined to produce an almost infinite variety of forms. The primary colors, a set of numerals, an alphabet, or a series of elementary shapes are not regarded as constraints by Martens, but inexhaustible tools for innovation.
On February 17 in the CAC Reading Room, Kunstverein München director Chris Fitzpatrick will introduce the project, and then co-curator Post Brothers will give a view of Marten’s practice using Johannes Schwartz’s documentation of the current exhibition. Marten’s video Not for Resale (2000) will be screened, and Graphic designer Julie Peeters will then introduce the recent publication and relate it to her ongoing work on Kunstverein Munchen’s Companion series of publications. The book will be available for purchase and will be inducted into the CAC Reading Room’s ongoing archive.
Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.