Michael Craig-Martin, a truly influential artist, has been awarded a Knighthood, in the Queen’s birthday honours list. As the ultimate catalyst of creativity and innovation, Craig-Martin received a CBE for his services to art in 2001 and is well known for his use of intense and vivid colour Mr Craig-Martin was born in Dublin Ireland in 1941. He grew up and 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.
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, and 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, and a second at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2006, and a third at the Serpentine gallery, London, in 2015.
He had his first one man exhibition at the Rowan Gallery in London in 1969. Since then he has shown regularly both in the UK and abroad. Most notably there was a major retrospective of his work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1989, and in 1991 he showed wall drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Group exhibitions include the British conceptual exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1972, The New Art, and the 1996 exhibition Un siecle de sculpture anglaise at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. He was the British representative at the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1998.
Craig-Martin is also widely recognised as an effective and influential teacher. His teaching career started in 1966, but it is his period at Goldsmiths College, London for which he is best known. His former students include many of those artists who made such a significant impact on the art scene in the 1990s; these include Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas.
He has curated exhibitions, including Drawing the Line, which toured venues including the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1995. He has also published many articles and essays and was a Trustee of the Tate Gallery.
Other art related honours went to Julia Peyton-Jones departing co-director of the Serpentine Gallery who was made a Dame and artist Eileen Cooper, the keeper of Prints at the Royal Academy, an OBE.