Published: 13/10/2024
The current exhibition at the Royal Academy is a retrospective covering the sixty year career of Sir Michael Craig-Martin. His work fills the main galleries of the RA and contains pieces from his early conceptual art right through to his recent, stunning digital installation, "Cosmos". His striking work fuses minimalist, conceptual and pop art and typically features everyday objects. The work on show includes sculpture, painting, drawing and installation.
The first room of the exhibiton is devoted to his conceptual art including the famous "An Oak Tree", a glass of water on a glass shelf with accompanying text where he states he has transformed the glass of water into an oak tree. There is also "On the Shelf" with its milk bottles on a sloping shelf, all filled with water creating a continous line.
As you go through the exhibition, you see more of Craig-Martin's depiction of everyday objets with the sharp, clean lines, which are his hallmark. There are sculptures, wall paintings, drawings and paintings. Everyday objects such as buckets, headphones, pencil sharpeners, phones, umbrellas, light bulbs, filing cabinets, step ladders and so on all appear out of scale and in various combinations.
The early rooms are monochrome but from the 1990s, colour appears in Craig-Martin's work. His use of the computer allowed him to bring in a wide range of vibrant colour and to create objects of varying size, scale and in whatever colour he chose.
In one room, Craig-Martin's paintings pay homage to artists of the past. We see his version of paintings, such as Manet's "Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe" and of Suerat's "Bathers at Asnieres". There are also works paying homage to Duchamp's "Fountain" and to Velazquez's "Las Meninas".
I found this exhibition tremendously enjoyable. It is fun and thought provoking raising questions about the nature of art and inviting visitors to engage using their own imagination.
The exhibition finishes on December 10th, 2024 and details can be found here.
Rob Bollington, October 2024.
