What happens if a style of art is so accessible as to become almost transparent? That you can look at it and process and understand everything there is to see, with no hesitation or resistance? Where there are no barriers whatsoever to understanding the work, no hidden meaning to uncover, no secrets to decode, where what you see is exactly what you get?

This is one of the questions raised by this massive and hugely enjoyable retrospective of the career of super-successful and instantly recognisable artist, Sir Michael Craig-Martin. As you can see by these examples, at a crucial turning point in the 1980s Craig-Martin stumbled across the fact that there was mileage in depicting common-or-garden everyday objects in the style of a Tintin cartoon i.e. with clear strong outlines, with no shading or inflection on the object itself, set against a pure plain background with no attempt at perspective or depth, with both object and background painted in single strong plain colours. What would happen then?

Turns out what happens is that we realise we are surrounded everywhere we go – from waking in a bedroom, to pottering round the house, to commuting to an office – by objects so humdrum and everyday that nobody really pays attention to them. So why not make them stars of their own paintings?

Craig-Martin spent the first 20 years or more in the States and you can see the debt to Andy Warhol’s depiction of iconic consumer products like the Campbell’s soup cans or Coca Cola bottles in two ways: one is to consider the object in the abstract, devoid of setting and background, like a kind of designer’s diagram. The second is to bring out the genius of their design, by depicting them in such a pure form, concentrating just on lines and outlines, as to bring out the purity and clarity, the design intelligence which has gone into so many of the man-made things which surround us.

Craig-Martin’s paintings make everyday objects thrilling and so make everyday life thrilling.

Starting at the beginning

Born in 1941 (so he’s now 83) Craig-Martin attended art schools in Paris, America and London before starting to create works in the mid to late 1960s, hence the curators’ claim that this represents a summary of a 60-year-long career. Although he’s overwhelmingly known for the object paintings he has in fact worked in sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, printmaking and digital media, creating works that fuse elements of pop, minimalism and conceptual art.

Examples of all these media and approaches are here in what amounts to the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Craig-Martin’s work ever held in the UK.

The show has a very straightforward chronological structure so room 1 displays his earliest works. They are heavily conceptual in that late-1960s way, in a way which reminded me of Yoko Ono i.e. you have to read the wall label to understand the concept the objects in front of you are fulfilling.

But you also notice that, right from the start, he was interested only in ready-made everyday objects like buckets, milk bottles and clipboards. For example ‘On the table’ which inverts your expectation that a table should be supported by four legs, whereas here it is supported by the objects which are on the table. But the real point is the everyday nature of the table, buckets and rope.

I particularly liked ‘On the Shelf’ for the dramatic sense of jeopardy it creates, the visual cleverness of making the different amounts of water in each bottle create a continuous horizon line, but also because they’re Unigate milk bottles, which I remember from my boyhood.

Other conceptual gags

I think of conceptual art as gags: what’s the joke, what’s the trick, what’s the gimmick, what’s the concept?  Apparently by the mid-1970s he felt he’d reached a dead end with the purely conceptual pieces and so reverted to drawing and painting on flat surfaces but using tricks or gags.

Thus a series of ‘Pictures within Pictures’. By inserting paintings found in London flea markets into the  top-left corner of blank canvases, he recontextualised the paintings in a way that ‘completely changed their meaning without changing them at all’.

In 1975 Craig-Martin began a series of ‘drawings’ in white neon, including ‘Reading Light’. His neon works were the first in which he drew rather than used real objects. As with his earliest pieces, the forms he used were primarily objects of daily use.

To quote the curators:

As part of his exploration of the basic elements of painting, Craig-Martin returned to the use of readymades by using Venetian blinds for this series. The artist’s use of these objects plays with considerations of colour, form, light and space, with their rectilinear shapes and solid colours suggesting a proximity to Abstract Expressionist colour-field painting. They also offer a metaphor for painting itself, framing a window onto the world.

The invention of outlines

The curators:

In a 1978 landmark exhibition held at the Rowan Gallery, London, Craig-Martin debuted his large-scale wall drawings. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s use of prefabricated objects and Andy Warhol’s focus on pop culture, Craig-Martin continued to incorporate recognisable manufactured items that were, in his words, “more famous than famous. So famous that you don’t even notice them.”

He began producing drawings of ubiquitous items, using crepe tape on transparent acetate or drafting film, which were then projected and traced on the wall, again using tape. Through his choice of media, Craig-Martin sought to remove the artist’s ‘hand’ so as to reflect the impersonal character of mass-produced objects.

This method also enabled him to layer several drawings of objects, leading to complex compositions. Craig-Martin chose a three-quarter view, showing each object slightly from above to emphasise its three-dimensionality.

In the early 1980s Craig-Martin began turning his drawings into wall-mounted sculptures, using thin metal rods. The linear simplicity of these drawings and sculptures became his hallmark and the foundation of his work to this day.

Eliminating style, creating a style

The curators:

Craig-Martin ‘draws’ with a particular type of crepe tape invented in the 1960s for electronic circuitry. As with his wall drawings, it allows Craig-Martin to achieve his ideal of making the works ‘styleless’, eliminating all trace of the artist’s ‘hand’. Ironically, in attempting to make his work style-free he has created a style that is immediately recognisable as his own.

The big room

All this is by way of explanation and foreplay before you walk into the enormous third room of the exhibition and are overwhelmed by the wall painted a solid Craig-Martin-ish green on which are hung ten ginormous works of his mature, object outline and plain colour paintings.

Beginning with two vibrantly coloured installations in 1993 and 1994, Craig-Martin’s output came to be dominated by site-specific painted installations. By the second half of the 1990s, he brought what these projects taught him to the more traditional medium of paint, which has remained at the heart of his  practice ever since.

The artist’s use of the computer from the early 1990s marked a creative turning point for him. It freed him to alter his drawings’ size and scale dramatically and gave access to an infinite range of colours. By the mid-2000s, as the world shifted from analogue to digital, he introduced depictions of laptops, mobile phones and memory sticks into his images, showing them from the front rather than from an angle.

Around that time, Craig-Martin moved from painting on canvas to using aluminium panels, the smooth surface allowing him to create flatter drawings and more even areas of colour.

In around 2000, Craig-Martin began painting crowded groups of objects, packed in ambiguous spaces. Here, objects are placed so close together that the background disappears. The use of non-naturalistic colours and changes in scale disrupt our sense of familiarity with each object and invites the viewer, as Craig-Martin explains, “to pass that first stage of recognition to some kind of second step of actually looking, to consider how things exist in conjunction with each other”.

A classic example being ‘Eye of the storm’ on the left here, painted in 2003 (next to ‘Sharpener’, 2002).

Variations on a theme

OK, so you’ve invented a striking, instantly identifiable look and brand which can be applied to more or less every domestic man-made object in the world. You could spend the rest of your life turning out thousands of these. Or you could play with what you’ve discovered and experiment with different approaches. And so:

Alphabet paintings

In the early 2000s, Craig-Martin embarked on a series of works in which he explored the relationship between text and image. He developed a ‘visual alphabet’ in which every letter was linked to an object, albeit with no apparent connection. For example, an umbrella represented the letter A, while a wine glass represented B and so on.

Word paintings

In the ‘Word Paintings’ gigantic letters spell out abstract concepts, such as ‘art’ or ‘death. They  are then overlaid with the drawings of the objects that correspond to each letter.

In this spirit is ‘Painting’ from 2010 in which the letters are painting in bold capitals while the ghostly outline of his characteristic objects (handcuffs, coke can, safety pin) hover transparently over them.

In these paintings, the letters are filled with solid colour while the objects are outlines. This juxtaposition invites us to contemplate the relationship between abstract concepts and tangible things in our lives.

Sex, death, love, painting – to be honest, I found these themes or topics pretty banal. Then again, maybe that’s the point. The point is there’s almost nothing behind these works, there are no hidden meanings and when Craig-Martin and the curators talk about ‘eternal themes’ they really mean the most obvious, clichéd themes imaginable. Maybe there banality and obviousness is deliberate.

The only ones with a bit of wit were a series of three paintings making an image rhyme with the word depicted – so a portrait of a pair of pliers with the word LIARS written over the top,  a picture of a glove with the word LOVE. I found these just that little bit more interesting than ones with just ART or DEATH painted on them.

Riddle paintings

Craig-Martin creates playful visual puns by connecting a word and an object through rhyme. The so-called ‘Split Paintings’ invite the viewer to imagine a connection between two different objects that have been cut in half and placed alongside one another.

Referencing modern art

Still want more variations? OK. Let’s apply this hugely distinctive outlines-and-bold-colours approach to classics of Western art. And so enormous Craig-Martin remixes of classics such as Édouard Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’, ‘Olympia’ and ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’, Georges Seurat’s ‘Bathers at Asnières’ and Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas.

Two thoughts: 1) Craig-Martin has cannily chosen paintings which are themselves very strong in outlining and lack the swirl and confusion of thousands of other subjects. They’re half way to being Craig-Martinesque before he gives them the treatment.

2) These interested me as being more or less the only works in the show which I actively didn’t like. It’s not spoofing old classics that’s the problem… it took a while for me to realise it’s because they feature people. At a stroke I realised absolutely every other image in the show is inanimate. Even when he does flowers, a bit later on, they are cut flowers, as you’d find them arranged in a vase. For some reason (for me, at any rate) Craig-Martined people just don’t work.

For inanimate household objects, his approach brings out unexpected beauty, especially of the design and outline of these goods, adding, amplifying, making them bigger and rather wonderful. When applied to people it has the opposite affect, of flattening them and so of draining them of meaning.

Doing Duchamp

As we’ve mentioned a number of times, right from the start of his career Craig-Martin has been interested in domestic objects which can also be seen as ‘ready-mades’. Ready-made was a term invented by Marcel Duchamp way back before the First World War for his habit of finding intriguing looking objects and simply placing them in art displays and calling them art. The most famous is the white porcelain urinal but there were others, wine racks and bicycle seats and whatnot.

Here, near the end of the show, are a set of works paying hommage to Duchamp and to his other inspiration, Andy Warhol, him of the soup cans and coke bottles. Both predecessors in finding immense beauty in carefully designed but mass produced everyday objects.

And so there’s a little set of works pastiching the design of Duchamp’s famous late work ‘the bride stripped bare’. I don’t think this adds very much to the original. More fun is a set of split prints this time small enough to fit into one group.

In these he’s chosen a set of iconic chair designs to go at the bottom of each print, accompanied by a classic piece of modern sculpture at the top. It’s a Where’s Wally challenge – can you identify the iconic objects in the top of each section? Top left are the bricks by Carl André, then a mobile by Alexander Calder, a ready-made wine rack by Marcel Duchamp then… it’s over to you!

Interestingly:

Of all the objects the artist has drawn, Craig-Martin considers chairs to be the most varied in terms of design, material and execution. He says, ‘the role of designers is to invent; the role of artists is to
observe.’

And what a brilliant observer he is, in his own highly stylised, totally accessible and yet inimitable way.

Cosmos

From this big red room we walk into a big darkened room hosting Craig-Martin’s first fully immersive digital work of art. It uses more than 300 images of objects the artist has made over the past 45 years, making it a fitting work for a retrospective. The animated video has been developed with Daniel Jackson and the accompanying soundscape with Benji Fox. This is a very enjoyable experience, and the room was full of young people sitting and lying around and oohing and aahing at the pretty pictures and the varied modern ambient soundtrack. As was I.

Central Hall site-specific

Craig-Martin started creating room installations in 1993. The Royal Academy’s Central Hall has four big arched doorways and over each of them he has created an entertaining trademark image beautifully and amusingly mapping onto the arches. Very stylish, very amusing.

Merch

Obviously there’s a load of merchandise in the shop, ranging from the stylish catalogue to a world of postcards, posters, tote bags and whatnot. But my eye was caught by these polished steel reliefs, titled (go on, guess) ‘Umbrella’ and ‘Book’ both designed and produced this year in a limited edition of 40. You can buy them to attach to your wall and impress visitors and guess how much? £5,400 each including VAT. Bargain. There’s your family Christmas presents solved 🙂

In the courtyard

Before you enter the show and after you emerge, a little dazed from all this dayglo brightness, in the courtyard to the Royal Academy stands a group of what the curators call ‘monumental sculptures by your man. Except they’re not monumental, are they? They’re actually the opposite of everything the word ‘monument’ suggests. They’re made in steel and painted with his trademark basic colours and were made this year, specially for this show. Designed to pose among and Instagram or Tiktok or Facebook yourself. What fun. What larks. Is this the most innocent art ever?

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Related links

• Michael Craig-Martin continues at the Royal Academy until 10 December 2024
• Download the large print guide i.e. all the wall labels (PDF)

Related reviews

• Transience by Michael Craig-Martin @ the Serpentine Gallery (November 2015)
• Michael Craig-Martin’s tour of his exhibition, Transience @ the Serpentine Gallery (November 2015)
• More Royal Academy reviews