To accompany his current retrospective at the Royal Academy, Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE RA (b. 1941), a popular figure in British art, has published a lush exhibition catalogue. He is among his generation’s most influential artists and teachers since his rise to prominence in the late 1960s. He has moved between sculpture, installation, painting, drawing and print, creating works that fuse pop, minimalism and conceptual art. His work transforms everyday objects – from buckets and ladders to trainers, mobile phones and laptops – with bold colours and simple, uninflected lines. Renowned as an art educator, he has inspired generations of artists, including the YBAs.
This handsome book, the catalogue of the largest exhibition of Craig-Martin’s work to have been mounted in the UK, contains thought-provoking texts by the critics Michael Bracewell and Richard Cork and an illuminating conversation between the artist and the writer Carolina Grau.
Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1941. He was educated in the United States, studying Fine Art at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. He has lived and worked in Britain since 1966.
His first solo exhibition was at the Rowan Gallery, London 1969. He participated in the definitive exhibition of British conceptual art, The New Art, at the Hayward Gallery in 1972. His best-known works include An Oak Tree of 1973, in which he claimed to have changed a glass of water into an oak tree; his large-scale black and white wall drawings; and his intensely coloured paintings, installations, and commissions, including the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg, the Laban Dance Centre in London (in collaboration with Herzog and de Meuron), the DLR station at Woolwich Arsenal, and, most recently, the HDI Gerling Headquarters in Hannover.
Over the past forty-two years, he has had numerous exhibitions and installations in galleries and museums across the world, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, MoMA, New York, the Kunstvereins in Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, and Hannover, at IVAM in Valencia, and Kunsthaus Bregenz. He represented Britain in the 23rd Sao Paulo Biennal. A retrospective of his work was presented at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1989, a second at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2006, and a third at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2015.
Recent solo exhibitions include Less is Still More at Krefeld Museum Haus Esters, Sculpture at Chatsworth House with Gagosian Gallery, Objects of Our Time at Cristea Roberts Gallery, and NOW, a touring exhibition in China.
Craig-Martin is well known for being an influential teacher at Goldsmiths College, London. He was a Tate Trustee from 1989 to 1999, awarded a CBE in 2000, and elected an RA in 2006. In 2016, he was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for his services to art.
He is represented in London by Gagosian Gallery and Cristea Roberts Gallery.
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