Brilliant Ideas Episode #28:
Michael Craig-Martin

Craig-Martin’s artworks embrace the conceptual exploration of the boundary between art and daily life. The subject of his works is mostly things that we use every day. For him, ordinary items such as a chair, a light bulb or a headphone, are the tools to reflect contemporary life and to deliver people’s language. He explains that it is not only to erase its functional aspect, but also to create a new meaning of everyday objects.
<An Oak Tree>(1973) is now regarded as a turning point piece in the development of conceptual art. It consists of two parts-a glass of water placed on a glass shelf, and a text mounted on the wall. There was no actual oak tree presented in the work. The oak tree, however, only exists in the text where the artist states that it is an oak tree, but in the form of the glass of water. The text is the only thing to connect the title ‘An Oak Tree’ to the work itself. What he has done is to produce a work visualizing an invisible concept with an irrelevant object. Asserting that the artist’s intention is more important than the object itself, he wanted to make a brand-new artwork that has the viewers see though its physical appearance.

One of the distinctive characters of Michael Craig-Martin’s works must be clearly outlined motifs and the vivid color palette. It reminds people of pop art when they encounter the bright colors of everyday objects in his paintings. But the artist said that it is not pop art. Whereas pop art takes popular images from mass culture like celebrities’ portraits or mass-products, Craig-Martin makes artworks based on ordinary objects found in daily life or his own imagery.
It is in the 1980s that he started paintings that look like pop art or illustration, focusing on a language of fine arts such as drawings and colors as well as conceptual approaches to objects. Craig-Martin used only black and white colors in his early works, and created minimal picture planes. He was interested in basic elements of a painting in that period; line, plane and shape. In <Private Dancer>(1984), he draws a headphone, the object, to a 3D space through drawing lines and color planes. This sculptural work made out of precise drawing lines shows the shift of his interest in key elements of fine arts and originality.

Vivid colors featured in works of Michael Craig-Martin seem like “Pop Art”, but the artist says that his work is not “Pop Art.” He uses a loud color to show advantages of a simple object. From drawing which combines various objects, materials and questions of art on expression, he expands the borderland of art work; painting, print, installation, drawing. As a result Michael Craig-Martin was a significant influence on the yBa.
Born in 1941 in Dublin Ireland, Michael Craig-Martin moved to U.S. and studied Fine Art at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Since 1966, he has been living and working in the U.K. Craig-Martin had his first solo exhibition at the Rowan Gallery London in 1969. Since then, he has had several exhibitions in many venues including the Whitechapel Gallery and MoMA(the Museum of Modern Art). The artist now represents the British contemporary art scene.