Martijn Sandberg ‘Image Messages’

The Amsterdam-based artist Martijn Sandberg (1967) works on the tension between text and image. He has developed his own typography, one that is so far removed from most fonts that they appear at first glance barely legible as text. Sandberg abstracts the appearance of the letters, reducing them to their essential structures, foregrounding their strong ornamental quality. The ‘image’ hides the ‘message’, one that can only be decoded upon careful inspection.
Despite this, the semantic function of ‘messages’ in Sandberg’s works are of central importance. The textual fragments inserted into the image by the artist often thematize a play on words or rather a play on the tension between image and message itself (‘kill the pics’, ‘no image, no message - no message, no image’).
In addition to the individual objects altered through silkscreen, laser cut, and reflective foil, he also creates wall sized works (wallpaper), on which the sampling of textual fragments result in a pattern. Examples of this can be seen in his works that engage with architecture and public spaces. Of these are two that provoked a bit of controversy- his covering the surface of a transformer station on the Hoofddorpplein in Amsterdam with the repeated phrase 'Power To The People' and the site-specific installation 'We’re Only In It For The Money' at the SVB Bank, Zaandam NL.

(Text: 'Image Messages', solo exhibition, Galerie Markus Richter, Berlin/ D, 2002).

Click here to view or download a PDF of text CV in English.

Click here to view or download a PDF of text CV in Dutch.





Martijn Sandberg


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