(b. Dublin, Ireland, 1941)

Michael Craig-Martin is a key figure of British conceptual art. He became one of the central figures of the British conceptual art scene in the 1960s and was an instructor at Goldsmith's College School of Art from 1974-88 and 1994-2000. At Goldsmiths, Craig-Martin influenced a generation of students now known as the Young British Artists. In his early work, Craig-Martin often incorporated readymades into sculpture and, in 1973, his elegant restraint and conceptual clarity was exemplified by An Oak Tree. The piece, comprising a glass of water on a shelf and a text asserting that the glass of water is, in fact, An Oak Tree propelled Craig-Martin to international attention. An interest in semantics and the relationship between objects and the concepts they may represent has continued to be a core theme in the artist’s work. In the 1990s, Craig-Martin made a decisive shift to painting and developed his hallmark style of precise, bold outlines describing everyday objects in flat planes of intensely vibrant colors. Since then, the artist has developed this vocabulary of objects in painting, sculpture, drawing, prints, and animations. These works continue his decades-long inquiry into the artistic potential of the readymade and the conceptual space between symbol and referent.

His most recent major exhibitions include W1 Curates, Oxford Street, London (2020); the Gallery at Windsor, Vero Beach, Florida (2019); Discover Green, Houston (2019), Gallery Hyundai, Seoul (2017, 2012); Himalayas Museum, Shanghai, which toured to Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan (2015); Serpentine, London (2015); Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas (2015, 2010); and Chatsworth House, Derbyshire (2014). Retrospectives of his work were presented at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 1989; the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2006; and at Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2015. Craig-Martin’s work is featured in several major Collections, including that of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Craig-Martin was an artist trustee of Tate from 1989 to 1999 and was elected to the Royal Academy in 2006. In 2016 he was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for his services to art.

Craig-Martin lives and works in London.