Karel Martens is a leading Dutch graphic designer and co-founder of the educational institution Werkplaats Typografie. This publication features 50 new works from his ongoing, lifelong monoprint series.
Martens continues to engage in experimental printing, using everyday industrial metal components—such as car engine parts, washers, and Meccano sets—as printing plates, layering ink multiple times with a small manual bookbinder's press. Rather than using blank canvas, he has historically overprinted geometric colours and patterns onto vintage printed matter, such as cigarette receipts, hotel notepads, and tax cards.
For this new body of work, the artist utilised a booklet of numbered cloakroom tickets—carefully kept in his studio for many years—as the substrate for 50 monoprints. All plates are reproduced at their original scale. By presenting both the front and back of the artworks on the page, the publication allows readers to appreciate in intricate detail the multi-layered ink, the distinct tactile quality of the paper, and the accidental textures unique to the hand-printing process.
