We cordially invite you to a virtual tour of our exhibition "EVERYDAY LIFE – Works by Alex Katz, Michael Craig-Martin and Julian Opie":

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Michael Craig-Martin

"I am trying to present objects in the simplest way possible, and I don’t want to supply too much context. All the basic information should be in the object itself. The viewer brings all additional information to the image. Many of these objects are mass manufactured. They are essentially impersonal, but if you own one, it’s very personal. The identifying personal association with these objects, which are not personal, is an important modern experience − our real association, the strands of our feelings about the objects that surround us. It’s also because they are so familiar, we don’t think of them as important in the world, but actually they are the world. We are living in a very material world."
Michael Craig-Martin

Born in Dublin in 1941, Michael Craig-Martin is one of the most important and influential artists of the English and Irish art scene. He grew up in the United States and studied at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture but spent most of his life in Great Britain. From 1974 to 1988, he taught at Goldsmith College London. His students included Liam Gillick, Damien Hirst and Julian Opie. From 1989 to 1999, he was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery.

Since 1969, he has participated in numerous British and international exhibitions, including the ground-breaking exhibition of British conceptual art The New Art at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1972. Since then, he has exhibited worldwide and created large-scale murals for museums, art associations, galleries and churches.

Craig-Martin is a conceptual artist. For him, the question of the presence of artworks is an important, if not the central idea of his entire oeuvre. For fifty years now, his work has consisted of ‘complicating and exposing and at the same time seemingly simplifying’ the manifold conceptions of our relationship to the things which we create, and which surround us. He decided to make real objects the subject matter of his paintings – simple arrangements of everyday objects. They are ‘objects that are (...) all very commonplace, easily recognizable, artificially produced, reproducible and machine-made’, as he himself has said. Objects are chosen with the intention of going beyond one-dimensional interpretations. They are objects of our time, but yet they also appear timeless in their form reduced to the line and their weightless monumentality.

© Galerie Boisserée, Köln und VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
© Michael Craig-Martin