Sir Michael Craig-Martin is a Royal Academician and one of the most influential artists and teachers of his generation. The Royal Academy of Arts presents the largest exhibition of Craig-Martin ever held in the UK, spanning his artistic development over a 60-year career and taking over the main galleries.
Featuring a dramatic site-specific installation, a group of monumental sculptures and new immersive digital work by the artist, the exhibition offers a comprehensive journey through six decades of Craig-Martin’s art. Since coming to prominence in the late 1960s he has moved between sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, prints and digital works, creating a body of work that has fused elements from pop, minimalism and conceptual art.
Craig-Martin transforms the Main Galleries with work from across his career, ranging from experimental sculpture and his landmark conceptual work An Oak Tree, to wall paintings and vast brightly coloured paintings of everyday objects playing with scale and depicting everyday objects such as umbrellas, safety pins, laptops and smartphones, through to Craig-Martin’s versions of iconic images from art history such as Duchamp’s urinal to Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia.
Visitors to the exhibition can expect to journey from conceptual through pop art and abstraction to an immersive installation, moving from monochrome galleries to uplifting pops of colour. Clever touches include an homage by the artist to his conceptual artwork An Oak Tree at the exit of the exhibition, in the form of a giant painting of a water glass surrounding the door frame and ‘Cosmos’, a 360 degree artwork featuring moving images of Craig-Martin’s visual alphabet which marks the first time he has worked with sound and demonstrates his endless ability to innovate. At the press conference Craig-Martin explained: “‘Cosmos’ for me is something extremely special and I can hardly believe it myself.”
Michael Craig-Martin is at the Royal Academy of Arts from 21st September to 10th December, 2024.
