Born in the Big Apple, Martin Geller has lived his entire life in New York. Successively a graphic designer, an artistic director in an advertising agency, on television for NBC, for Broadway posters, the music industry or publishing, he has cultivated a sensitivity, a style since high school. Rewarded many times for his work, he is now retired and devotes himself to what has always driven him: creating.

Colorful references

When Martin is asked about the artists who inspire him, he begins by falling silent and taking a deep breath. “Where to start…” First with Georges Braque, and Juan Gris, whose perfect cubism and the joy that naturally emerges from their works he appreciates. Then comes Edward Hopper - like any self-respecting New Yorker, you might say - for his end-of-day light, for his way of suspending time, then Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Milton Glaser, Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Moore, Santiago Calatrava, Grant Wood… The list goes on. How can we be surprised by the variety of his work? Rich in heterogeneous influences, Martin Geller offers work that is sometimes figurative, suggestive, dreamlike, sometimes modernist, and does not claim to be anyone’s epigone.

Bauhaus Exhibition I , “one of the best examples of Bauhaus design”

“The Bauhaus movement is visual poetry. It balances shapes, colors, and visual tensions in their purest form.” This reflects Martin’s attachment to the Bauhaus school, whose architectural style inspired European design more broadly at the turn of the 1920s. The work he is most proud of is certainly Bauhaus Exhibition 1, recognized by many as a paradigm of Bauhaus design, and otherwise wrongly interpreted as being an original from 1923. Isn’t that the most beautiful recognition?