MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN (IRISH 1941-) §
UNTITLED (HEADPHONE FRAGMENT) - 2017
£10,080
Contemporary Art // Prints & Multiples
Auction: Contemporary Art: 10 January 2024 | From 10:00
Description
oil on metal panel
Dimensions
60cm x 60cm (23.5in x 23.5in)
Footnote
‘What’s more famous than famous? And more famous than famous is ordinary, because ordinary is everywhere, ubiquitous, instantly familiar and so familiar that it’s invisible.’ – Michael Craig-Martin, interviewed by ‘It’s Nice That’, 2019
Michael Craig-Martin is one of the dominant names in British conceptual art. His imagery - line drawings of everyday objects, precisely and minimally represented in a Pop vocabulary in block colour fields - have virtually transcended the art world and now inhabit the realm of the design classic. He was also a noted teacher, influencing the Young British Artists generation (including Damien Hirst) at Goldsmiths College.
Born in Ireland, Craig-Martin’s family moved to America when he was still a child. He studied painting at Yale where the influence of former department head Josef Albers, a proponent of minimalism of colour and form, continued to reverberate. Alex Katz also taught there and was a notable stylistic influence on the younger artist, as too was exposure to contemporary Pop Art. From 1966 Craig-Martin lived and worked in Britain, becoming a key figure within the burgeoning conceptual art movement. His seminal 1973 work An Oak Tree saw Craig-Martin, in Duchampian fashion, place a glass of water on exhibition with side text arguing that it was, in fact, an oak tree.
The work we are delighted to offer here for sale is more tangible a prospect but no less philosophical in its inception. Craig-Martin began producing pared-back representations of everyday objects in 1978 and has continued ever since. As with the imagery of Andy Warhol, whose work he greatly admires, his artworks are conceived as a visual trigger of sorts. The mundane nature of the subjects he portrays encourages the viewer to imbue them with meaning; their own memories, responses, and relationships to the item in question. However, although Warhol’s iconography and sensibilities echo within his work, Craig-Martin contends that he is not fascinated by consumerism in the same way, nor is he making a political comment about our excesses in that regard, an interpretation that has been applied to his work in more recent times.
The continued documentation of everyday objects has (to the intrigue of the artist himself) found its meaning evolve over time. The physical representation of his practice does not change, but the layers of meaning his audience apply to it does. Through a contemporary lens Craig-Martin’s work now reads as a monument to transience; to items now obsolete or having fallen out of use. His work has almost assumed the status of archival imagery, representative of a snapshot in time within our rapidly changing culture, and its Pop aesthetic striking an ironic note that encourages us to perceive an underlying social commentary. What at first appears simple is indeed quite the opposite.