About the Artist
Martin Engelman
Martin Engelman (1924-1992) was a Dutch cartoonist, painter and graphic artist, born in Hoenkoop, the Netherlands. Engelman first made a name throughout Europe as a typographer, graphic designer and set and exhibition designer. In the late 1950s, he moved toward fine art exclusively, both as a painter and printmaker. His first gallery solo exhibition was at age 36 in 1960 in Paris. Lithographs, woodcuts, etchings and aquatints became an important part of his oeuvre, and Engelman produced some 200 limited edition prints. Engelman’s style and subject matter showed a rather individual approach that had connections to 1950s European art but was decidedly on the periphery of the dominant 1960s art movements. He absorbed influences from old Dutch masters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel as well as 20th-century movements such as Surrealism and CoBrA, creating work inhabited by strange creatures, animal-human hybrids, dolls and mythological figures. During a stay in the United States in 1965, he worked in Herman Cherry’s New York studio. Engelman had several solo exhibitions in the United States and showed across Europe, including at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Art, Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna. In 1964, he was represented at Documenta III in Kassel, Germany.
