Daniel Craig-Martin, the colour paintings

Daniel Craig-Martin, the paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts.

This is the third post on the Daniel Craig-Martin exhibition. You can see the first post here and the second post here

Beginning with two vibrantly coloured installations in 1993 and 1994, Craig-Martin's output came to be dominated by site-specific painted installations (see one such work in the Central Hall at the end of this post). By the second half of the 1990s, he brought what these projects taught him to the more traditional medium of paint, which has remained at the heart of his practice ever since.

The artist's  use of the computer from the early 1990s marked a creative turning point for him. It freed him to alter his drawings' size and scale dramatically and gave access to an infinite range of colours. By the mid-2000s, as the world shifted from analogue to digital, he introduced depictions of laptops, mobile phones and memory sticks into his images, showing them from the front rather than from an angle. Around that time, Craig-Martin moved from painting on canvas to using aluminium panels, the smooth surface allowing him to create flatter drawings and more even areas of colour.

Cassette, 2002, (acrylic on canvas)

Self-Portrait

Pricks, 2020

Sharpener, 2002, (acrylic on canvas)

Las Meninas II, 2001, (acrylic on canvas)

Here, Craig-Martin pays homage to Diego Velazquez's Las Meninas (1656), replacing the figures in the original painting with contemporary objects. Velazquez locates the viewer in the position of the King and Queen whose portrait we see him painting, so that the spectator becomes the artist's subject. This alighs with Craig-Martin's career-long interest in the viewer's active involvement in the making of the artwork.

Velazquez's Las Meninas is probably the artwork that has fascinated artists most. You can read about it here . 

Furthermore, in this post you can see some of the ways artists over the years have tried to grapple with painting that has fascinated them.

History Painting, 1995, (acrylic on aluminium)

One of Craig-Martin's earliest colour paintings, this work brings together two forms of expression. The artist explains: 'I've tried to reconcile certain aspects of abstraction and representation that are usually considered irreconcilable'. The bucket and the clipboard - both recurring motifs in Craig-Martin's early work - are assertively figurative, while the large blocks of clour-filled spaces hark back to Abstract Expressionism.

Bulb, 2014, (acrylic on aluminium)

Untitled (with suitcase), 2020, (acrylic on aluminium) 

Space II, 2016, (acrylic on aluminium)

Untitled (Phone X), 2019, (acrylic on aluminium)

Word Paintings and Single Objects:

In the early 2000s, Craig-Martin embarked on a series of works in which he explored the relationship between text and image. He developed a 'visual alphabet' in which every letter was linked to an object, albeit with no apparent connection. For example, an umbrella represented the letter A, while a wine glass represented B and so on. In the 'Word Paintings' gigantic letters spell out abstract concepts, such as 'art' or 'death'. They are then overlaid with the drawings of the objects that correspond to each letter. In another type of painting, Craig-Martin creates playful visual puns by connecting a word and an object through rhyme. The so-called 'Split Paintings' invite the viewer to imagine a connection between two different objects that have been cut in half an placed alongside one another.

Untitled (painting), 2010, (acrylic on aluminium)

Untitled (death), 2008, (acrylic on aluminium)

Untitled (art/blue), 2024, (acrylic on aluminium)

Untitled (sardine tin/handcuff), 2007, (acrylic on aluminium)

Untitled (love/glove), 2007, (acrylic on aluminium)

Recent Paintings:

Craig-Martin intends to make us aware of the ways in which we perceive the world. As the artist has stated, 'works of art can be meaningful without containing readily definable meaning. They are stimulants for our imagination, intended to be experienced not interpreted and are most useful when they provoke an unfamiliar experience'. He demonstrates how we can recognise objects no matter how unnaturalistic their colour or scale. When his work reduces the subject to a detail, we still easily identify them by completing them using our memory and imagination.

Recently he has developed themes such as musical instruments which are shown individually or in crowded compositions. his fruit and vegetable paintings were a result of the Covid-19 lockdowns when the only shopping visits permitted were to acquire food. It occured to him that these familiar 'objects of nature' were as universally recognisable as the manufactured objects he had painted before.

Untitled (vegetables with blue lines), 2023, (acrylic on aluminium)

Interior (with chaise), 2021, (acrylic on aluminium)

Untitled (fruit with blue lines), 2022, (acrylic on aluminium)

Cosmos, 2024, (vector animation on four 4K projectors and sound via 12-channel surround speaker array)

We then entered Cosmos, a room where we were surrounded by Craig-Martin's fully immersive digital work. More than 300 images have been used of objects the artist made over the past 45 years. 

The Exit wasn't quite an exit, as there was more to see:

Zaha Hadid, 2008, (bespoke software and vector artwork)

In the early 1990s, Craig-Martin started using computers to create digital artworks. When commissioned to make a portrait of the architect Zaha Hadid by the National Portrait Gallery in 2007, Craig-Martin realised that a digital medium could create a 'living' portrait. His digital portraits are generated by software that continually changes the colour configuration so each moment is unique.

George Michael, 2007, (bespoke software and vector artwork)

Laura Burlington, 2009, (bespoke softward and vector artwork)

Finally:

Eye Test, 2018, (LED lightbox)


 

Daniel Craig-Martin - the early years

Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy of Arts.

This is the second post on this exhibition. You can see the first one here

Craig-Martin is one of the key figures in British conceptual art. Since coming to prominence in the late 1960s he has moved between sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, printmaking and digital media, creating works that fuse elements of pop, minimalism and conceptual art.

Educated primarily in the USA, Craig-Martin moved to the UK on completion of his studies in 1966. He exhibited the now iconic work An Oak Tree in 1973. From the mid-1970s he shifted his practice from using ready-made objects to representing them pictorially. Over the years he has developed a wide-ranging 'vocabulary' of everyday items including safety pins, light bulbs, take-away coffee cups and laptops.

Craig-Martin's intention is to explore ordinary contemporary life through the things we make, including consumer goods and works of art. He has sought to create works that are straightforward and undidactic, giving the viewer scope to use their imagination. His concern lies in understanding not just how we think and feel about the world, but how we perceive and experience it daily through the language of images.

Powder-coated steel sculptures in the forecourt of the Academy:

Quite a few of Craig-Martin's sculptures were displayed on the forecourt of the Academy. These monumental sculptures play with the tension between the three-dimensionality of sculpture and the two-dimensionality of drawing. Craig-Martin views these works as sculptures of drawings. From the front, the objects read as being two-dimensional and are easily identifiable, while from the side, the subjects collapse into a single line and the object depicted becomes strangely unreadable. The scale and colours used to represent these familiar items lend them a presence that is simultaneously modest and heroic.

Inside the galleries:

Early works:

Following his graduation from Yale School of Art in 1966, Craig-Martin began to produce sculptural works based on the minimalist and conceptual movements of the time.  One of his earliest is Black Book, which transforms two mundade items into a work of art. Other early projects include his box pieces, which brought geometric forms together with functionality and direct audience participation.

From the early 1970s he began working with ready-made objects such as buckets, milk bottles and clipboards to produce a group of wall-based sculptures that explored the relationship between art and everyday items.  Following An Oak Tree, Craig-Martin felt that he had reached a conclusion to the conceptual path he had been following and returned to basics through drawing and image-making.

Black Book, 1967, (cardboard and tape)

Box that Never Closes, 1967, (blockboard, polyurethane paint, varnish and brass hardware)

The lid and base do not fit together so the object cannot perform as an actual container, nor arrive at a neat geometric shape. Stripped of its standard use, Box That Never Closes plays with the viewer's expectations and invites us to question what makes an object a work of art. 

On the Shelf,  1970, (15 milk bottles, water, metal shelf)

Image-Making and Readymades:

Reading Light, 1975, (neon)

In the second half of the 1970s Craig-Martin began working in pictorial representation and image-making, seeking a new way forward in his practice. His neon works were the first in which he drew rather than used real objects.

Untitled Painting No. 3, 1976, (oil on canvas)

His work with found objects continued with his series 'Pictures within Pictures'. By inserting paintings found in London flea markets into the top-left corner of blank canvases, he recontextualised the paintings in a way that 'completely changed their meaning without changing them at all'.

The following decade saw Craig-Martin return to 'readymades', prefabricated objects repurposed as art. He created a series of wall works using Venetian blinds, playfully questioning what we perceive as a painting. He then began to paint similar abstract works dominated by solid colour and patterns of white dashes. These were the first instance of his empathic use of colour.

Untitled (red), 1988

The artist's use of Venetian blinds plays with considerations of colour, form, light and space, with their shapes and solid colours suggesting a proximity to Abstract Expressionist colour-field painting. They also offer a metaphor for painting itself, framing a window onto the world.

Wall Drawings and Sculptures:

Influenced by Marcel Duchnap's use of prefabricated objects and Andy Warhol's focus on pop culture, Craig-Martin continued to incorporate recognisable manufactured items that were in his words, 'more famous than famous. So famous that you don't even notice them'.

He began producing drawings of ubiquitous items, using crepe tape on transparent acetate or drafting film, which were then projected and traced on the wall, again using tape. Through his choice of media, Craig-Martin sought to remove the artist's 'hand' so as to reflect the impersonal character of mass-produced objects. This method also enabled him to layer several drawings of objects, leading to complex compositions. He chose a three-quarter view, showing each object slightly from above to emphasive its three-dimensionality.

Craig-Martin 'draws' with a particular type of crepe tape invented in the 1960s for electronic circuitry. As with his wall drawings, it allows him to achieve his ideal of making the works 'styleless', eliminating all trace of the artist's 'hand'. Ironically, in attempting to make his work style-free he has created a style that is immediately recognisable as his own.

Reading with Globe, 1980, (tape on wall)

Pen and Ink, 1985, (painted steel)

In the early 1980s he began turning his drawings into wall-mounted sculptures, using thin metal rods. The linear simplicity of these drawings and sculptures became his hallmark and the foundaiton of his work to this day.

Sea Food, 1984, (oil on aluminium and painted steel)

Dolly, 1983, (oil on canvas and painted steel)

In this work, there is an early combination of flat and simplified lines, with the bold colours that would become characteristic of Craig-Martin's later style. Merging two modes of artistic expression, the colour blocks refer to abstract art, while the sculptural drawing is figurative.

An Oak Tee, Daniel Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy of Arts.  An Oak Tree.

This post is just on An Oak Tree, an installation by Michael Craig-Martin. I saw this artwork at Tate Modern (I think ?) many many years ago, I was intrigued by it so I remembered it very well. But, I did not remember who the artist was. In fact I did not know Craig-Martin's work - it was later that I fell in love with his coloured paintings - so I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was the first artwork in the exhibition of Craig-Martin's work at the RA. There will be posts on the rest of the exhibition but this is just about  An Oak Tree.

Following his graduation from Yale School of Art in 1966, Craig-Martin began to produce sculptural works based on the minimalist and conceptual movements of the time.  He began working with ready-made objects such as buckets, milk bottles and clipboards to produce a group of wall-based sculptures that explored the relationship between art and everyday items.

In one radical work, An Oak Tree (1973), a glass of water is accompanied by a text declaring that the artist has transformed the object into a tree. With this uncompromising statement, Craig-Martin challenges the perceived roles of artist and audience in making a work of art.

An Oak Tree, 1973, (glass, water, metal and printed text on paper)

The text accompanying the artwork:

Following An Oak Tree, Craig-Martin felt that he had reached a conclusion to the conceptual path he had been following and returned to basics through drawing and image-making.