Michael Craig-Martin, Untitled (8 ball), 2024, Acrylic on aluminium, 60 x 60 cm. © Michael Craig-Martin. Photo: Lucy Dawkins, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Michael Craig-Martin has been immersed in a world of industrially manufactured objects since the 1970s. Since then, he has continuously enlarged and updated this universe of objects, using them to explore the aesthetics of contemporary consumer society everywhere.
Michael 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.
The artist has been immersed in a world of industrially manufactured objects since the 1970s. Since then, he has continuously enlarged and updated this universe of objects, using them to explore the aesthetics of contemporary consumer society everywhere. In retrospect, one can say that Craig-Martin's œuvre up to today serves as a documentary archive, recording not only our shift from the analogue to the digital world, but also the constant acceleration in production and everyday consumption, as well as the never-ending growth of the sheer range of products that are made.
In his recent works he also depicts cut flowers and vegetable collages. However, although these objects initially seem very incongruous – nature versus technology – they all faithfully follow the principle of Michael Craig-Martin's work, as they represent objects from today’s Western consumer society that have become so commonplace in our everyday lives that we hardly even notice them. Yet tomatoes and avocados, like sunflowers or MacBooks, are also domesticated and mass-produced, and thus they too represent the fact that organic goods can be manufactured just like artificial goods. These new motifs are a logical extension of Craig-Martin's pictorial vocabulary.
Craig-Martin is well known to have been an influential teacher at Goldsmiths College, London. He was a Tate Trustee from 1989 to 1999, was awarded a CBE in 2000 and was elected an RA in 2006. In 2016 he was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for his services to art.