Introduction by Michael Bracewell
Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE, RA is one of Britain’s most celebrated and influential artists working today. His distinctive wall pieces, paintings, and sculptures depicting everyday objects, from sunglasses and shoes to light bulbs and laptops, all drawn in outline and often in intense saturated colours, are instantly recognizable.
Coinciding with a major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts, this volume is the catalogue raisonné of Craig-Martin’s entire work in print and multiples. Having produced his earliest prints in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the artist has made working in editions an important part of his practice for thirty-five years. Screenprints, etchings, letterpress, lithographs, light boxes, computer works, and metal reliefs all present his familiar repertoire of objects in his signature style. More recent works see him expand his subject matter to include flowers and fruit. Here too are his series in which he explores famous paintings from the past by artists such as Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, Diego Velázquez, and Georges Seurat, and iconic designs by modernist architects and designers. Acclaimed writer Michael Bracewell’s introduction demonstrates the significance of printmaking for Craig-Martin’s depictions of the modern age. Featuring high-quality reproductions of more than 300 individual works, this beautifully produced book is the complete collection for specialist and general reader alike.
Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE, RA was born in Dublin in 1941. At the age of four, he moved with his family to the United States, where he was brought up and educated. Between 1961 and 1966, he studied at Yale School of Art and Architecture. He returned to Europe in the mid-1960s and was a key figure in the first generation of British conceptualists. As a tutor at Goldsmiths College in London from 1973 to 1988 and again from 1994 to 2000, he had a significant influence on two generations of young British artists.
Craig-Martin has had exhibitions and retrospectives at museums and galleries across the world, and has several permanent large-scale installations in the UK, Europe, and Japan. In 1989, he was appointed a trustee of Tate Gallery; in 2001, he was awarded a CBE; in 2006, he was elected a Royal Academician; and in 2016, he was knighted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. His work is held in many international museum collections, including Tate, London; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2024, he was given a major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He is the author of On Being An Artist, also published by Art / Books.
Michael Bracewell is the author of several novel and novellas, including The Crypto-Amnesia Club (1988), Perfect Tense (1999), and, most recently, Unfinished Business (2023), and multiple works of non-fiction on popular culture and modernity. He has written widely on modern and contemporary art, and contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues. A collection of his writings on art, The Space Between, was published in 2011. He is the author of Modern World: The Art of Richard Hamilton, also published by Art / Books.
