Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin is one of the most celebrated artists of the present day. As an Royal Academician, he was recently responsible for curating the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, and this year the exhibition has been considered by many to be its best ever, with added verve.  The staircase of the Academy was covered in multicoloured strips and the space quite literally transformed.  Born in Dublin in 1941, Craig studied in Paris and Yale, where latterly he was influenced by Josef Albers.  He is a conceptual artist who raises the everyday object to iconic status through colour and line and has lived in Britain since 1966.

Over the past forty-two years he has had numerous exhibitions and installations in galleries and museums across the world, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and MoMA, New York, the Kunstvereins in Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, and Hannover, at IVAM in Valencia, and Kunsthaus Bregenz. He represented Britain in the 23rd Sao Paulo Biennal. A retrospective of his work was presented at the Whitechapel Art Gallery London in 1989, and a second at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2006.

Craig-Martin is well known to have been an influential teacher at Goldsmiths College, London. He was a Tate Trustee from 1989 to 1999, was awarded a CBE in 2000 and was elected an RA in 2006.