LONDON.- The Royal Academy of Arts is presenting the largest retrospective of Michael Craig Martin RA’s work ever to be held in the UK. A key figure in British art, Craig-Martin (b.1941) is one of the most influential artists and teachers of his generation. Curated in close collaboration with the artist, this ambitious exhibition encompasses the broad repertoire of Craig-Martin’s sixty-year career. Presented across the Royal Academy’s Main Galleries, it brings together over 120 important works spanning from the 1960s through to the present day, including sculpture, installation, painting and drawing, as well as newly conceived works for the occasion.
Craig-Martin was born in Ireland and studied in America before moving to London in 1966, where he has lived ever since. Fusing elements of pop, minimalism and conceptual art, his work transforms recognisable objects – from household items to mobile devices, famous art works to modernist buildings – with bold colours and simple uninflected lines. Combined they take on the resonance of history paintings, portraits or still-lifes, a reflection of contemporary life shaped in the image of the objects that define it. His influence extends beyond his own work; as an art educator he has inspired generations of artists, in particular many of the Young British Artists (YBAs), who made a significant impact on the art scene in the 1990s, including Damien Hirst, Gary Hume RA, Sarah Lucas and Fiona Rae RA.
Works from across Craig-Martin’s career are presented chronologically through the Main Galleries. Seminal early pieces in which the artist used found objects such as buckets, milk bottles and mirrors show the experimental origins of his practice. On display are On the Table, 1970 (Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 2004), in which four metal buckets of water serve as the counter-balance to the suspended table on which they stand, and An Oak Tree, 1973 (Courtesy the artist) comprising a glass of water on a shelf and an accompanying text in which the artist explains that, outward appearances notwithstanding, he has changed the humble object into an oak tree. Representing the culmination of his conceptual work, this now legendary piece focuses on the role of belief in shaping the dynamic between artist, artwork and viewer. Following An Oak Tree, Craig-Martin reached a ‘full stop’, after which he sought a new direction away from conceptual art.
A further section of the exhibition reveals how a new focus on drawing gave rise to Craig-Martin’s large-scale wall drawings in tape, executed with the use of projections. Tape drawings such as Interlocked (MoMA project 1990), 1990 (Courtesy the artist), which has been recreated in situ on the gallery walls, give prominence to generic everyday objects, ones that might normally lie in the background yet are fundamental to our daily lives. Over time, Craig-Martin has created a thesaurus of selected motifs that he has repeated and adapted to different spaces and situations. Notably, such motifs fill the large-scale, colourful paintings that came to dominate Craig-Martin’s practice in 1990s, and for which he is now best-known, such as Eye of the Storm, 2003 (Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 2005).
The exhibition presents the many facets of Craig-Martin’s painting practice, including his depictions of single objects that highlight how his motifs have changed over time; the buckets and ladders of post-industrial life in the West give way to mobile phones and iPads; the cheap and the discarded becoming luxury items around which people build identities today. These hang alongside his word paintings such as Untitled (Painting), 2010 (Gagosian, London), in which the artist explores the relationship between text and image. The following space has been dedicated to his reworkings of iconic works from art and design, such as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair (1929).
The exhibition concludes with works conceived specifically for the exhibition. One gallery has been dedicated to a large-scale, immersive and dynamic digital experience with floor-to-ceiling projected images, while the Central Hall has been transformed in to a site-specific, vibrantly coloured installation that engages with the architecture of the space. The exhibition extends outside to the RA’s Annenberg Courtyard, where a number of Craig-Martin’s monumental and colourful line sculptures of commonplace objects are on display.
Michael Craig-Martin follows in the RA’s tradition of celebrating its Royal Academicians, continuing a strand of programming that has showcased some of the most important living artists including Marina Abramović, William Kentridge, Antony Gormley, Ai Weiwei and Anish Kapoor. Craig-Martin was elected as a Royal Academician in 2006 and became Senior Academician in 2015.
