Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin portrays everyday objects with nuanced simplicity, revealing tensions between the objects and their representations. His work is characterized by outstanding draftsmanship, vibrant color, and uninflected lines, rooted in an exploration of the relationships between perception, language, and meaning.

Biography of Michael Craig-Martin

Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941 and spent his early years in the United States, where his family relocated in 1946. In the 1960s, he obtained a BA and MFA from Yale University School of Art and Architecture, studying alongside Jennifer Bartlett, Brice Marden, and Richard Serra. His inspiration came from the legacy of Josef Albers and the emergence of Minimalism and Pop art.

Michael Craig-Martin returned to the United Kingdom in 1966 and participated in The New Art, a significant exhibition of Conceptual art at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1972. The next year, he created "An Oak Tree" (1973), a pivotal work in British Conceptualism.

In the later 1970s and 1980s, Craig-Martin transitioned his focus from ready-made objects to their pictorial representations. He reimagined everyday items from an unconventional perspective through wall drawings executed in various scales, using black crepe paper drafting tape originally designed for electrical circuitry. Creating consciously inexpressive and "styleless" images, he made precise depictions from life on clear acetate sheets, projecting and tracing the results onto gallery walls. In these images, Craig-Martin explores a diverse array of everyday objects, such as safety pins, chairs, light bulbs, and laptops. Employing layering, intersection, and transparency effects, the artist portrays his subjects individually, devoid of shadows or indications of use or aging.

In the early 1990s, Craig-Martin's artistic process underwent a significant transformation, marked by the introduction of an intense chromatic range. Aligning with his preference for archetypal entities, the artist's approach involves using only basic, easily identifiable colors. Each color highlights the descriptive and psychological potential of its neighboring hues. Initially manifesting in room-filling installations, this approach later extended to works on canvas and aluminum, prints, computer portraits, and, since 2011, sculptures in powder-coated steel. 

Over the past forty-two years, Michael Craig-Martin has been featured in numerous exhibitions and installations at galleries and museums worldwide. His works have been showcased at prestigious venues such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA in New York, Kunstvereins in Dusseldorf, Stuttgart and Hannover, IVAM in Valencia, and Kunsthaus Bregenz. Notably, he represented Britain in the 23rd Sao Paulo Biennal. 

Michael Craig-Martin is renowned for his influential role as a teacher at Goldsmiths College, London. He served as a Tate Trustee from 1989 to 1999 and received a CBE in 2000. Recognizing his contributions to the arts, he was elected as a Royal Academician (RA) in 2006. In 2016, he was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours for his distinguished services to art.