Martin Venezky

Martin Venezky is an artist based in San Francisco, California. Throughout his career as a graphic designer, Venezky has maintained a deep interest in photographic process and abstraction. For the past several years, he has created new bodies of work in photography and photographic installation.
Venezky has an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and an MFA in Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has taught at RISD and CalArts and, for over 25 years, at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he is currently Professor in the Graduate Design Program. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art honored Venezky with a 2001 solo exhibition, and his monograph, It Is Beautiful…Then Gone, was published by Princeton Architectural Press. In 2015 Venezky was inducted into the esteemed Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI). In 2018, the Letterform Archive acquired an extensive collection of is work, studies and process for their permanent collection.

DELTA HEX

“Delta Hex” is a photographic installation created for an Oakland, California workspace. The site-specific work greets visitors as they ascend the stairways connecting five of the building’s floors.

My process dissects vision into concise elements that I combine and build into large kaleidoscopic structures. For these panels, I created 6000 abstract light, shape and color studies shot in my studio and on location.

The compositions are constructed slowly by hand, allowing the relationships between the images develop gradually. The result is an attempt to see the world in a state of pre-language: a conversation between form, color, and structure as passages transition between dynamism and calm.

Each set of panels is inspired by its surroundings—beginning with the underground subway station that the site straddles, continuing up through the street level foliage, trees and traffic, to the rising architectural neighborhood and finally up to the clouds, sun and sky. The hexagon, for which the work is named, is a motif used extensively throughout the interior design of the space.

To view more of Martin Venezky’s work please visit his website.