Michael Craig-Martin, undoubtedly one of the most influential figures of contemporary British art, was born in Dublin in 1941. The artist’s family moved to the United States, specifically Washington, DC, when he was but a child. He began painting while reading English Literature and History at Fordham University in New York (1959). His passion took him the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (1961) in Paris before returning to the US to graduate in Fine Art from Yale University School of Art (1966). Craig-Martin was inevitably affected by the endless theoretical developments of the period. Having returned to Britain in 1966, where he established himself as a forward-thinking practitioner, Craig-Martin also influenced the contemporary art scene as a teacher at the Goldsmith College School of Art (London) from 1966 to 1988 and from 1994 to 2000. Most of the pupils under his tutelage would come to be part of the Young British Artists, a group that counts among its ranks the likes of Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Rachel Whireread.
Artistically, Craig-Martin explored and questioned the boundaries of conceptual art, hinting at its Minimalist origin and Surrealist ancestry (chiefly through the use of found objects). Semiotics, semantics, the limits of meaning, and object-symbol relationships are at the core of his diverse and evolving corpus. An Oak Tree (1973), which consists of a glass of water on a shelf paired with text declaring that the glass is, in fact, an oak tree, is a fundamental work of his early period. The 1970s saw the introduction of drawings in his corpus, which have expanded into a formal language of their own. Painting once again took centre stage in his practice in the 1990s, vivid colours and geometric patterns painted on scales monumental enough to rival architecture itself. More recently, the master’s focus switched to powder-coated steel forms attempting to capture the ordinariness of everyday objects. Regardless of the medium favoured at any given time, Craig-Martin’s desire to stimulate our capacity to imagine absent forms through symbols and pictures has remained undeterred.
Although Craig-Martin held his first one-man exhibition at the Rowan Gallery in London in 1969, he perhaps made a greater impression by being featured in The New Art at the Hayward Gallery in 1972, an exhibition which defined and cemented British conceptual art. Since then he has exhibited in all major museums (the Centre Pompidou, the MoMA, the Kunstverein, the IVAM, the Kunsthaus Bregenz, among others) and enjoyed three retrospectives: one at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1989, a second at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2006 (which included over 40 years of works in all mediums), and a third at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2015, which brought together works from 1981 to 2015.
Some noteworthy supplementary exhibitions and projects are Drawing the Line from 1995, a drawing focused exhibition presented at the Southbank Centre in London, and his inclusion in Un siècle de sculpture anglaise held at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, which helped popularise contemporary British artists in France.
In 2016 he was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for his services to art.
Craig-Martin lives and works in London.
