Michael Craig-Martin

My installations question the nature of picture making. Instead of looking at a painting, it feels like you are stepping inside it. All the images are sucked in onto the canvas and then exhaled on the wall opposite.
—Michael Craig-Martin

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Michael Craig-Martin. The exhibition entitled "Eye of the Storm," will include both works on canvas and an installation painted directly onto the gallery walls. The mural illustrates everyday objects that seem to be held motionless just for a few moments before being swirled around the gallery by the storm and onto the canvas.

Craig-Martin is fascinated with the dialogue between representation and reality within art, and with the conflicting roles of the author and the viewer. The everyday objects that reoccur throughout his work are flattened and simplified, functioning as words do in language. The selection of these objects, their color, their spatial relationships, and their juxtaposition are what provides the tension and narrative within the work.

Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941, brought up in the United States, and educated at Yale. He returned to Europe in the mid-sixties where he became one of the key figures of the first generation of British conceptual artists. He was a professor at Goldsmith's College from 1974–88 and 1994–2000, where he taught Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, among other artists who would become known in the early nineties as the "Young British Artists."