Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941. He is best known for his line drawings and intensely coloured paintings, sculptures, prints and installations based on images of familiar objects. He was awarded a CBE in 2000, elected an RA in 2006, and knighted in 2016.

Craig-Martin grew up and was educated in the United States, studying Fine Art at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture.  He moved to Britain on completion of his studies in 1966. His first one-person exhibition was at the Rowan Gallery, London in 1969.  Since that time he has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Britain and internationally, including the definitive exhibition of British conceptual art, 'The New Art', curated by Anne Seymour at the Hayward Gallery in 1972.  His work has been concerned with fundamental questions about the nature of art, about representation, authorship, and the role of the viewer, explored primarily through commonplace objects both real and as 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 wall drawings of common objects, and his recent intensely coloured room installations and paintings.

A major retrospective of his work was held in London at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1989.  In 1994, he made site-specific installations at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and at the Museum Sztuki at Lodz in Poland.  In 1995, he curated 'Drawing the Line', a comprehensive exhibition of line drawings from pre-history to the present day, which was shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.  He created large-scale, site-specific installations at Düsseldorf Kunstverein (1997), Hannover Kunstverein (1998) and Stuttgart Kunstverein (1999).  He represented Great Britain at the São Paulo Bienal in 1998 and created a major wall painting installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1999.

He was Millard Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College from 1994 to April 2000.  He was a Trustee of the Tate Gallery from 1989 to 1999.