Bright Idea

Credit: Gift of Dato' Kho Hui Meng 2017, Collection of SMU

A principal figure of British conceptual art, Michael Craig-Martin is concerned with the nature of representation and the role of the spectator. He explores this through probing the relationship between objects and images, and playing with absent forms and our capacity to imagine it.

The perceptual tension between object, representation, and language has been his central concern over the past four decades. His early work drew together a variety of objects and materials, and questioned the nature of art and representation. ‘An Oak Tree' (1973) is one of his best-known early works—it comprises a glass of water on a shelf and a text written by him asserting that the glass of water is, in fact, an oak tree. This interest in semantics, the play between rhetoric and object, continues to be a core theme in his work.

In the 1990s, Craig-Martin made a decisive shift to painting and developed his distinctive style of precise, bold outlines demarcating flat planes of intensely vibrant colours. Recently, he has realised his compilation of a whole vocabulary of objects through painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, installation, projection, and animation.

In this artwork, he plays a lot with perception. Viewed frontally from a distance, it looks like a 2D drawing in space. But move closer, and it takes on a more solid sculptural presence. However, move closer again to view it from the side, and it disappears into a single yellow line.

Michael Craig-Martin (b. 1941, Dublin, Ireland) grew up and was educated in the United States. He studied Fine Art at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture. On completion of his studies in 1966, he moved to London where he has lived ever since. As a tutor at Goldsmith's College from 1974-1988 and 1994-2000, he had a significant influence on two generations of young British artists, among them those known as the ‘Young British Artists'.