Michael Craig-Martin was born in 1941 in Dublin Ireland. He grew up and was educated in United States, did his fine art at Yale university school of art. He came to Britain on culmination of his studies in 1996 and he worked and lived there ever since. Whilst at Yale University, Craig-Martin met his colleague and future wife Jan Hashey with whom he had a daughter, Jessica Craig-Martin. He is divorced from Hashey.
He gained an interest in art through one of the
priests, who was an artist, and was also strongly impressed by a display in the
Phillips Collection of work by Rothko. Even though His parents had no lean to
art, though they did have on display in their home Picasso's Greedy Child. He
attended drawing classes given there by artist in Washington, then in 1959
attended Fordham University in New York for English Literature and History,
while also starting to paint.
His first solo exhibition was at the Rowan Gallery,
London in 1969. He participated in the definitive exhibition of British
conceptual art, “The New Art” at the Hayward Gallery in 1972. Throughout his
career, he has explored the expressive potential of commonplace objects and
images. 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
public commissions.
"Picture of An oak tree of 1973"
An Oak Tree consists of an ordinary glass of
water placed on a small glass shelf of the type normally found in a bathroom,
which is attached to the wall above head height. Craig-Martin composed a series
of questions and answers to accompany the objects. In these, the artist claims
that the glass of water has been transformed into an oak tree.
Over the past fifteen years he has done
exhibitions and site specific installations in numerous museums and public
galleries including Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, the
Kunstvereins in Hannover, Dusseldorf, and Stuttgart, IVAM in Valencia, the
Magasin in Grenoble, the Arp Museum in Rolandseck, and the National Art Centre
Tokyo. He represented Britain in the 23rd Sao Paulo Biennale.
A retrospective of his work was presented at
the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London 1989 and at the Irish Museum of Modern
Art in Dublin in 2006. Craig-Martin is well known to have been an influential
teacher at Goldsmiths College London, and is considered a key figure in the
emergence of the young British artists in the early 90’s. He was elected to the
Royal Academy in 2006. He is represented by the Gagosian Gallery.
In his new and vivid acrylic-on-aluminium
paintings, Craig-Martin continues his currently happening explorations of
reality and theatrical in art. Each painting is predicated on a single word,
such as “art” or “sign,”which he treats tautologically, interweaving the
letters of the word, delivered in varying sizes, with line drawings of mundane
objects such as shoes, hammers, light bulbs, safety pins, and chairs, against a
vivid monochrome background. The combined effect of the letters and the objects
reduced to pictogram creates an illusion of transparency and depth of field;
narrative play results from this collocation and layering. Through such
apparently random groupings Craig-Martin exploits the complex and often
consistent relationships between word and image.
[ART (green), 2010
Acrylic on aluminum
48 x 48 inches ]
My view about his work :
I like his work because his paintings are simple enough to seem obvious but complex enough to provide a variety of avenues for imaginative and aesthetic play, as my drawings are simple enough yet trying different things at a very simple level. Instead of looking at a painting, it feels like you are stepping inside it.
Quotations: Michael Craig-Martin: 'Any creative person has more options than you
could possibly deal with.'
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