Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin has been a key figure in conceptual art since the 1970s through his practice that focuses on the gaps between visual representation, language, and ideas. He has been influential both as an artist and as a teacher.

Craig-Martin was a fine art tutor at Goldsmiths’ College in London and made a significant contribution to the emergence of the group of graduates who became key members of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement that dominated the 1990s. This group included Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst, Gary Hume, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and Angela Bulloch, who are also represented in the UBS Art Collection.

From the late 1970s onward, Craig-Martin turned to making highly graphic and crisply rendered line drawings depicting ordinary household objects, creating an ever-expanding language of images that continues to form the basis of his practice today. By the 1990s, Craig-Martin had extended this language and technique to painting, in which boldly outlined images and bright, flat color schemes are applied not only to canvases but also to increasingly elaborate wall paintings. Since 2011, Craig-Martin has been producing sculptures made from intensely colored powder- coated metal. These sculptures are also created in Craig-Martin’s signature style, defining the outlines of banal objects such as umbrellas and light bulbs, but now occupying a three-dimensional space, often on a monumental scale. ‘Light’ (2018) is a special commission made in collaboration with the UBS Art Collection, specifically for the ground foor of UBS’s headquarters at 5 Broadgate in London. It is the artist’s first indoor sculpture of its kind.

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