Michael Craig-Martin
Michael Craig-Martin, born 1941 in Dublin, Ireland, lives and works in London. Having grown up and studied in the United States, he settled in the United Kingdom in 1966, where he played a key role in shaping British Conceptualism and taught at Goldsmiths, mentoring several Young British Artists. Craig-Martin is renowned for depicting everyday objects with a nuanced simplicity that exposes the tensions between objects and their representation. His work is distinguished by exceptional draftsmanship, vibrant color, and uninflected line. Intensely visual, it is rooted in an exploration of the relationships between perception, language, and meaning.
Michael Craig-Martin Editions
Savarin Can (Turquoise)
2018
Archival inkjet on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Bright White paper, 42 x 29.7 cm. Edition of 50, signed and numbered.
Michael Craig-Martin explores the visual and societal coding of everyday objects, which he stages as contemporary icons. By reducing them to clear contours and vibrant color fields, he imbues them with a symbolic charge that transcends their original function. In this context, Craig-Martin also incorporates motifs from art history, such as Jasper Johns’ iconic paintbrushes in a Savarin can, which he references in this edition. By omitting the characteristic “Savarin Coffee” inscription, he further abstracts the image-object, transforming it into a quiet, universal icon.
EUR 2,500
Signs of Life
2006
Published for Kunsthaus Bregenz
Duratrans color film mounted to glass, in a black painted aluminum electrical light box, 49.5 x 67 x 3 cm (19½ x 26¼ x 1¼ in). Edition of 30, signed and numbered.
In this edition, Michael Craig-Martin brings together iconic depictions of everyday consumer goods – including mobile phones, light bulbs, and wine glasses – manifesting his concept of a "visual vocabulary." The abstracted, brightly colored outline drawings strip the objects of their functional meaning and place them within an art-theoretical discourse. Following the traditions of Dada and Minimalism, Craig-Martin challenges the relationship between representation and reality. The schematic depiction of a urinal alludes to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), a paradigmatic readymade that explores the transformation of the everyday into an artistic context.
EUR 3,000
