ARTSY FARTSY started in 2018 with one artist and a simple complaint: the posters on most walls looked the same. I paint and draw under the name Martin Zen, and the shop began as a place for my own work — ironic slogans, surreal sketches, and art that was meant to make people feel something. Today we sell work by more than 1,000 artists from all over the world, and every print is still made in our own studio in Copenhagen.
Where it is printed
We don't send your order to a print farm. Every poster is printed in-house on a Canon imagePROGRAF GP-4600, a large-format printer built for colour-critical poster and art printing, with pigment inks. The paper is a 230 g matte fine art paper: heavy enough to lie flat in a frame, with a surface that shows deep blacks and soft gradients without the glare of a glossy poster.
Because we print ourselves, we control the whole chain from file to finished print, in five sizes all the way up to 100×140 — the size guide explains the five formats.
The frames
Our frames are made in Denmark. Oak and black run through every size from 21×30 to 100×140, and there is a dark brown solid wood frame and a set of colours up to 50×70. If you want it ready to hang, our framing service mounts the print in the frame before it leaves us, so it arrives finished — no fiddling with clips and glass on the living room floor.
Mr. Ballet - Martin Zen
Vespa Ballerina - Martin Zen
The Moon - Martin Zen
Rothko Goes Bananas - Martin Zen
Tree of Life Collage - Thomas Nordentoft
Bauhaus Woman 03 - David Wolf
The artists
Alongside the classics — Hilma af Klint, Matisse, Klee, William Morris — most of what we sell is by living artists: illustrators, painters and designers from Denmark, the rest of Europe and much further away. They earn a royalty every time one of their works is sold, keep the rights to their art, and are free to sell it elsewhere too. Many of our best sellers come from exactly these artists: Thomas Nordentoft's Tree of Life, David Wolf's Bauhaus women, Tara Green's reworkings of Hilma af Klint. You can meet some of them in From the Artist, and if you make art yourself, you can sell it with us.
The shop
We also have a physical shop in Copenhagen, at Reberbanegade 3, where you can see the paper, compare the frames and buy prints on the spot.
| Day | Opening hours |
|---|---|
| Monday–Friday | 10–19 |
| Saturday | 10–17 |
What that means for you
A poster from us is printed for your order, on paper you can feel the weight of, in the same city where the shop is. Half of what we do is making that print; the other half is helping you hang it well — which is what the guides on this site are for. Start with how high to hang art, or browse the bestsellers to see what other people have chosen.
— Martin Zen, founder