Untitled

Michael Craig-Martin (1941 - )

Acrylic on canvas

1998

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© Michael Craig-Martin

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  • About the work
    Location
    Country: Austria
    City: Vienna
    Place: British Embassy

    In this bold painting by Michael Craig-Martin, ordinary objects are depicted against a coloured background, neither touching nor overlapping one another. These discrete images appear unrelated to each other conceptually as well as compositionally: what exactly links a bunch of keys with a chair? The disparity of scale adds to our sense that the artist's choice of objects was arbitrary. Craig-Martin typically works with a restricted (but vivid) palette of colours and repertoire of images. He views his works as "pictorial readymades", referring to the practice of elevating ordinary objects to the status of "Art", simply by virtue of having been selected by the artist.

  • About the artist
    A hugely influential figure in the art world, Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin, grew up in the United States, and has lived in Britain since 1966. Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1989), the Serpentine Gallery (2015), and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016). His exhibitions have included large-scale wall drawings in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and wall paintings at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He is widely acknowledged for his influence as a teacher at Goldsmiths’ College in London, where he taught from the early 1970s and remains Professor Emeritus of Fine Art. Young British Artists’ Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas number among his former pupils. Craig-Martin was a Trustee of the Tate between 1989-1999 and was made a CBE in 2001.
  • Explore
    Places
    Subjects
    umbrella, key, cabinet, chair
    Materials & Techniques
    acrylic (paint), canvas, acrylic painting
  • Details
    Title
    Untitled
    Date
    1998
    Medium
    Acrylic on canvas
    Dimensions
    height: 198.50 cm, width: 152.50 cm
    Acquisition
    Purchased from Waddington Galleries, March 1998
    Inscription
    none
    Provenance
    The artist; purchased from Waddington Galleries, 1998.
    GAC number
    17319