The Haight Street Art Center is pleased to present Amsterdam Calling: The Paradiso Posters of Martin Kaye, 1972-1983, an exhibition of 90 screen printed posters from the collection of Kareem Kaddah, presented with the cooperation of the Martin Kaye Alphabet Index & Library Foundation, www.paradisoposters.nl. This is the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to Kaye's posters for Paradiso.

 

Built as a church in 1880, Paradiso has been Amsterdam’s premier tabernacle for live music since 1968, hosting acts as diverse as Pink Floyd, the Patti Smith Group, and Willie Nelson. Between 1972 and 1983, more than 1,000 posters were printed to advertise shows for the likes of Elvis Costello, the Plasmatics, Nico, Blondie, and Prince, all of them designed by a British expat named Martin Kaye (1932-1989).

 

By all accounts, Kaye lived and breathed the posters he screen printed from the basement of Paradiso. His aesthetic was dominated by heavy bold letters selected from a dazzling array of fonts, many of Kaye’s own invention. Kaye’s Paradiso posters could also be light and colorful, especially when he chose to print using the split-fountain technique.

 

From the vantage point of 2024, Kaye’s work for Paradiso is in a class by itself, wedded neither to the psychedelic posters of the 1960s that preceded it or the punk flyers of the 1970s, which vied for space with his Paradiso posters on the crowded posting walls of Amsterdam. In this respect, Kaye’s work stood apart from both rock-poster history and its contemporaneous wheat-pasted competition, resulting in posters that were both the product of a man obsessed with typography, as well as a response to the urban environment in which that man and his screen-printed advertisements lived.