Michael Craig-Martin’s Object Lessons at the Royal Academy
In 1973, Michael Craig-Martin set a water glass on a shelf high on a gallery wall. The arrangement was called An Oak Tree and included wall text that asked viewers to resist the temptation to think it was a glass of water. No, it was indeed an oak tree.
The radical act is still one of Britain’s definitive conceptual artworks. It has remained a deceptively simple but bold meditation on “transubstantiation,” the idea that imbuing an earthly object with astral meaning—much like red wine becoming the Blood of Christ in Christianity—is possible for us.
Everyday ephemera, from water glasses to discarded coffee cups, continues to be an enduring passion in Craig-Martin’s robust artistic playbook. The artist, now six decades into his practice, is the subject of a buzzy new retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts (R.A.), London. The 120 featured works range from early conceptual efforts like An Oak Tree and On the Table (1970) to garish exercises that recolor cell phones and safety pins on the canvas. There’s also an entirely new piece, Cosmos, which digitizes past artworks into an immersive video display.
“He is one of the most prominent artists working today in the country,” Axel Rüger, R.A. secretary and chief executive, tells Observer. Craig-Martin has been accorded the rare honor of a retrospective while still alive in the R.A.’s palatial galleries, and it’s one comprehensive survey. “It was important for us to show the whole range of his career—works from 1965 to others that were finished last week,” says Rüger. (Rüger, meanwhile, will head to the Frick Collection as director when the museum reopens in the spring of 2025.)
Craig-Martin, 83, may have spent most of his life in Britain (his adopted homeland) but has yet to have a major show of this scale there. It’s one unfortunate fact now rightly rectified. “There’s something very unique that a retrospective represents,” Craig-Martin says of the honor, “which is the opportunity … to see [a] whole life in about 15 minutes. I go from 1967 to this year.”
The Irish-born, Yale-educated sculptor and painter has been at the forefront of Britain’s contemporary art scene for decades. Following a “Duchampian tradition” (as Rüger tells Observer), Craig-Martin has long reused found objects and infused each with a philosophical or emotional power. It’s an interest that has fed his work across mediums, where he lifts familiar fixtures of our lives and reappropriates each into banal or gaudy representations.
If the 1970s were about radical conceptualism, the 1990s saw Craig-Martin shift gears entirely. He didn’t, however, completely abandon his penchant for found objects. Craig-Martin moved to the canvas to paint bold acrylic works of things like filing cabinets and world globes, outlining each in deep black lines while filling in the blank spots with vivid color.
“Michael Craig-Martin” imitates the shock of color found in such pieces, with gallery walls pilfering the lurid palette of paintings like Cassette (2002) and Zoom 2 (2024). The minimalist paintings display the everyday trappings of our lives, like defunct audio cassettes and blinking personal computers, all while enveloping viewers in a kind of psychedelic visual world.
Associations with the aesthetics and politics of Pop Art are fair to make, as these similarly have an irreverence, simplicity and flatness that likewise pushes bottle openers and credit cards into a new sphere of meaning. “These paintings of everyday objects have him… liberate color from the object and from reality,” says Rüger.
The paintings revel in the delight that such vibrant blues, yellows and greens can elicit, especially when they play with the lexicon of advertising and themes of mass consumerism. But know that Craig-Martin himself is sensitive to over-interpretation—sometimes his art is simply to be experienced.
Before he put brush to canvas, Craig-Martin taught several well-known makers and shakers of the famed Young British Artists (YBA) group in the 1980s. The class at Goldsmiths included Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume, with his tutelage an apparently liberating one. “Michael is an artist who never imposed his own aesthetic or art practices on his students,” Rüger says. “He gave his students the license to be themselves, to take risks and to command a certain commitment.”
Even so, his role as their educator—shaping such pioneering figures to be fearless and iconoclastic—is hard not to ponder, especially when considering his bright creations that clearly play with our expectations of meaningless urban discards. Meaning is clearly there, even if we are told to perhaps resist it by the artist.
The show stresses how Craig-Martin has used our insignificant miscellanea to challenge such perceptions through rendering rescaled in acrylics. Cassette tapes, soda cans and French fries are cartoonishly reimagined in unlikely color compositions (such as pink fries with green packaging) for memorable visual contrasts. The sight of an iPhone hung high on an R.A. gallery wall, reads as a suggestive comment on how we do bow down to these devices (take any iPhone launch event) as if they were religious icons.
Every interplay found in these uninflected but overly-saturated works encourages a simple emotive pleasure, all relished in the visual contradictions laid out here.
Small incidental things, from light bulbs to laptop computers, are resituated from commercial placements into these reductive renderings. Each seemingly agitates at the aesthetic ideas found in advertising, mass consumer culture and our ever-increasingly visual language of symbols. No longer is the cup a symbol of a coffee brand but a gaudy sign of consumption. Or waste? Or urbanity? Or a coffee date? Or all four? Craig-Martin won’t commit.
There’s also no obvious answer, but the color alone gives plenty of joy and mirth, with some subliminal message apparent. “These emphatic colors have nothing to do with the objects,” says Rüger. “We know the texture, how heavy it is, what color it normally has… we bring all of this to it. We ‘picture’ it.”
Past conceptual efforts on display, however, clearly provoke a more cerebral response than anything emotional. Take On the Table, a table with buckets of water that act as a heavy counterbalance to the suspended table on which they stand. Against the gravitational push and pull, it illustrates a literal paradox and pushes us to rethink our loyalties to the rules of physics.
Some might say his repetitious visual style is uninspired, prosaic or even complicit in its apparent critiques. But “Michael Craig-Martin” cogently stresses the power that lies in such repetition, particularly with the disposability of our consumerist age. After all, such found objects are mass-produced, mass-marketed and mass-consumed. Yet so rarely do we probe that noxious relationship in our lives. Flattening each and framing with gaudy colors pushes us to at least try, even if we may sometimes see the exercise as trite or repetitive. That, to Craig-Martin, is the point.
Now with a half-century of found objects and ready-mades behind him, Craig-Martin’s message remains that new meaning—both altered and absent—can be found in our everyday junk. His lurid, flat and sometimes depersonalized paintings and sculptures are the unique ciphers conveying just that.
“Michael Craig-Martin” is on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in London through December 10. Advanced booking is recommended.