Michael Craig-Martin

I want my paintings to be simple enough to seem obvious but complex enough to provide a variety of avenues for imaginative and aesthetic play.
—Michael Craig-Martin

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Michael Craig-Martin. This is his first solo exhibition in Greece.

In his early work, Craig-Martin often incorporated readymades into sculpture and made knowing references to American Minimalism. His elegant restraint and conceptual clarity is exemplified by An Oak Tree (1973), comprising a glass of water on a shelf and a text written by him asserting that the glass of water is, in fact, an oak tree. This interest in semantics, the play between rhetoric and object, continues to be a core theme in his work.

In the 1990s, Craig-Martin made a decisive shift to painting and developed his hallmark style of precise, bold outlines demarcating flat planes of intensely vibrant colors. Through exacting draughtsmanship, he uses composition to explore spatial relationships by juxtaposing and layering color. He paints groupings of letters that may form a number of words; he also depicts banal, manufactured objects. The painted words often refer to abstract qualities and concepts, while the objects are based on the familiar and concrete. However, he does not paint a specific chair, or shoe, or cell phone, but rather a generic typology for each that he repeats throughout his oeuvre. In his eyes, these ambiguous combinations of letters and schematic templates of mass-produced objects create potential for other viewers to derive a range of personal meaning from the paintings.