London,
For nearly six decades he has been trying to reflect everyday themes and objects in his works from a perspective that seeks to be as objective as possible and, with an economy of means that has become his hallmark, he has developed an extensive catalog of images that are very familiar and that express complex ideas with simple resources.
The largest retrospective of Michael Craig-Martin ever presented in the United Kingdom has just opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, it has been curated in collaboration with the artist and consists of 120 works dated from the sixties to the present, including sculptures , installations, paintings and drawings, some of them made specifically for the occasion; this is his most ambitious exhibition.
Born in Ireland in 1941, he trained in the United States before returning to London in 1966, and has lived there since then, dedicating part of his time to teaching (he has notably influenced the generation of the Young British Artists, who were part of , among others, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Fiona Rae) and giving shape to a production in which he has transformed recognizable objects and creations into axes of reflection – from household items to mobile devices, famous works of art and modernist buildings -, using simple lines, without inflections, a striking palette and an aesthetic that combines elements of minimalism, pop art and the conceptual trend. It grants, to these frequently used items, the formats of historical paintings, so together they can be considered still lifes or portraits representative of contemporary life, of our tendency towards materialism and accumulation.
The main galleries of the Royal Academy house, in chronological arrangement, a selection of pieces dated throughout his career, from the earliest, based on objects found at street level (buckets, milk bottles and mirrors, which refer to the experimental origins of his practice). We will see the facilities On the Table (1970), in which four metal buckets filled with water serve as a counterweight to the suspended table on which they are located, or An Oak Tree (1973), which consists of a glass of water on a shelf and a text in which the artist explains, fully appropriating conceptual thought, that despite what it may seem, he has transformed the humble object into an oak tree. He turned appearances into air.
That work, now emblematic, is one of his essays on the role of beliefs in shaping the dynamics between the artist, the work of art and the viewer; After it came a sort of impasse for Craig-Martin in which he sought directions that would distance him from the conceptual, directions that in some cases involved large-scale wall drawings complemented with the use of projectors. one of them was Interlockedwhich was displayed at the MoMA in New York in 1990 and which has been recreated on the walls of the English museum: here it gave prominence to everyday objects, in the background of our care but fundamental to the progress of our daily lives.
Fundamentally, from that moment on, the artist began to create a dictionary of potentially artistic motifs that he has repeated and adapted to different spaces and situations: they are the ones that also populate his large paintings with very vivid tones, to which he has been dedicating himself since the nineties and which most of us recognize; is the case of Eye of the Storm (2003), arrived at the Royal Academy, like so many others, from the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
The changes in their use of one or another utensils reflect parallel social changes: from their first cubes and ladders, typical of a West in a post-industrial stage, they moved on to mobile phones and iPads; It has been turning what is discarded and cheap into paradoxes, into luxury items around which identities are built today. Another chapter of his recent production is his word paintings, also present at the Royal Academy: they serve to study the relationships between text and image.
The tour closes by examining his reworkings of fundamental works of art and design, from the Duchampian fountain to the chair Barcelona by Mies van der Rohe, presenting his works executed for this anthology, an immersive digital experience (Craig-Martin’s painting, in fact, already is) and several monumental sculptures of his everyday pieces, the latter in the Annenberg courtyard of the Ra.
This exhibition continues the line of programming that the Royal Academy offers to its living academics: Craig-Martin has been one since 2006 and follows in the exhibition trail of Marina Abramović, William Kentridge, Antony Gormley, Ai Weiwei and Anish Kapoor.
Michael Craig-Martin
ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS
Burlington House
Piccadilly, London
From September 21 to December 10, 2024
