Michael Craig-Martin talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work.
Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941, and grew up in the US, but has been based in London for most of his working life. Over the past six decades he has created an instantly recognisable body of work in which everyday objects are depicted simply in black outlines and often filled and surrounded by saturated, bright colour. The objects can be alone, in close-up fragments, or in complex combinations, and are captured in everything from small prints to room-scale installations.
Michael Craig-Martin, Untitled (painting), 2010. Acrylic on aluminium, 200 x 350 cm. Gagosian, London. © Michael Craig-Martin
Photo: Dave Morgan. Image courtesy of Gagosian
Intending at first to eschew style, Craig-Martin came to realise that his technique is inimitably his. And the works’ meaning has also shifted over the decades, gaining new and poetic meanings.
Fifty years on from his first drawing, his core questions remain: what is it to represent something, to make an image of it? How does image-making work? What does it allow you to do? And what happens when a viewer encounters what you have done? The result is a world of sensation and visual and experiential pleasure that might seem unexpected given the nature of the items he depicts.
This knack of making the humdrum compelling, even lending it a sensory power and emotional resonance, is why Craig-Martin has remained an enduringly significant figure in contemporary art. He talks about returning to the basics of drawing in the mid-1970s when it was “forbidden territory”, his slow but eventually hearty embrace of colour, why humour is a useful tool in addressing subjects of the utmost seriousness, his early encounter with the work of Picasso as a child in Washington DC, the effect of studying according to the principles of Josef Albers at Yale, his admiration for Bruce Nauman and Gerhard Richter, and his love of the work of Samuel Beckett.
Plus, he responds to our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
Michael Craig-Martin, Common History: Conference, 1999. Acrylic on aluminium, 274.3 x 508 cm. Gagosian, London © Michael Craig-Martin
Image courtesy of Gagosian
Michael Craig-Martin, Royal Academy of the Arts, London, 21 September – 10 December; Michael Craig-Martin: An Anthology, Prints and Multiples 1996 – 2024, Cristea Roberts, London, 25 October-23 November
This podcast is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the arts and culture app.
The free app offers access to a vast range of international cultural organisations through a single download, with new guides being added regularly. They include several museums and galleries that have shown and collected Michael Craig-Martin’s work, from the Whitechapel Gallery and Leeds Art Gallery in the UK to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Download Bloomberg Connects and you will see that the guide to MoMA has in-depth information on exhibitions and displays across all the floors of the museum, with audio guides to the vast array of Modern masterpieces in the museum’s collection to a feature on the latest exhibition in its Projects series, with the Brazilian artist Tadáskía. You can hear Tadáskía discuss the poetry, artist’s book and wall drawings that comprise the show.
