Michael Craig-Martin B.1941 Untitled, 2000 Acrylic on Canvas 84 X 56 Inches 213.4 X 142.2 Cm
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Michael Craig-Martin b.1941 Untitled, 2000 acrylic on canvas 84 x 56 inches 213.4 x 142.2 cm Provenance The Artist WaddingtonGalleries, London Sammlung Froehlich, Stuttgart Exhibitions London, Waddington Galleries, Michael Craig-Martin: Conference, 3May–3 June 2000 (ex-catalogue) Austria, Kunsthaus Bregenz, MichaelCraig-Martin: Signs of Life, 10 June–13 August 2006, illus colour p51 Description ‘My hope in the work is that by bringing certain objects together, you start to see connections, narratives, metaphors between some of them, and then the next one doesn’t fit the pattern, and you have to look again. I try to create as many threads of meaning as possible. But every one of them is at some point denied.’1 Rich with saturated colour, Untitled, 2000 is a striking example of Michael Craig-Martin’s iconic graphic style. Here, on a background of flat, vivid lilac, five seemingly incongruous motifs are united in a playful composition which collapses reference points such as scale, time and space. Craig-Martin first began making line drawings of ordinary objects in 1978 and he has continued this practice ever since. Early drawings were typically made in pencil in an A4 drawing pad, which he would then trace out onto sheets of acetate or drafting film with crepe tape (often black and sometimes red). However in the 1990s, having purchased his first computer, Craig-Martin stopped producing physical drawings, and instead began making them digitally as vector illustrations on a less sophisticated version of CAD, replacing his pencil with a mouse.2 This new method facilitated a greater degree of experimentation, enabling Craig-Martin to play around with the scale of an image, its orientation, colour and the thickness of the line with one click of a button. He has said, ‘In a way, I think of the work I did before the computer as merely waiting for the computer to come along. It was as though I’d been anticipating it. If I’d tried to think of a technological way of helping me to do what I was doing, I’d have come up with a computer that does exactly what it does for me.’3 Working on the computer has enabled Craig-Martin to produce work far quicker than previously possible, ‘I make twenty drawings a day on the computer.(…) all the thousands of drawings I do now exist digitally and they only exist physically if I print one.’4 The artist uses this stock of individual drawings to carefully plan the composition and colour palette of his paintings digitally, ‘Making very small decisions and alterations’ 5, ‘in order to find the one that’s right.’6 The five motifs that make up this painting - the bunch of bananas, hanging jacket, pencil sharpener, five cigarettes and Alvar Aalto Paimio Chair (1931–2), would have originated as five separate digital drawings, which Craig-Martin would have inserted into photoshop and manipulated on screen. Craig-Martin’s recent paintings are all made using the same, self-devised, method. Once he has determined the composition on screen, he projects the image directly from the computer onto his chosen support – the wall, an aluminum stretcher, or, as here, a canvas which he staples directly onto his studio wall – this provides a hard, even surface upon which to work and only later, once the painting is complete, is the canvas fixed to a stretcher. Before pinning the canvas to the wall however, Craig-Martin primes the canvas with gesso and paints the entire surface with black acrylic using a paint-roller.7 Once dried, he traces over the projected image using thin, flexible tape, effectively masking the outline of each objects. Each area of colour is then painted in separately using four-inch paint rollers, to achieve the flat, pure hues that we see in the finished work. Finally, after all of the colours have been added and the paint has dried, Craig-Martin carefully peels off the tape to reveal crisp black outlines, which can be seen to sit just behind the coloured surface.8 Of his paintings created in this way the artist has said, ‘They have a very particular physicality because of the way the images are drawn with tape that is then removed; the lines are etched into the paint.’9 Despite their digital origins and graphic appearance, Craig-Martin emphasises that his paintings are ‘tediously handmade’ and have ‘a visual intensity and physical presence not possible in any other medium.’10 Creating such paintings on canvas - the most ‘traditional’ support available, is for Craig-Martin an ‘ironic gesture’ which contradicts their contemporary feel and the process by which they were made.11 Craig-Martin typically buys high quality acrylic paint from the ‘Artist’ and ‘Studio’ ranges of the brand Lascaux. He uses the colours straight from the bottle – although he will mix white with a colour in order to lighten it, he never mixes one colour with another. When constructing a painting Craig-Martin tends to select one key colour first, making all subsequent choices of colour in relation to the first, for he believes, ‘Each colour carries with it the capacity to reveal the full range of emotional, descriptive, psychological potential of all the others.’12 Expanding on this further he has said, ‘The way I use colour has nothing to do with the way I do the drawing. The drawings are as precisely like the thing as I can make it and the colour is as artificial as I can make it. I play with the colour in different ways. It is in a way subverting the drawing. It is not playing the same game as the drawing. The colour represents all the things about the specificity of objects, about our own relationship and emotions and feelings about them. All these things are to me represented in the colour. The colour is what introduces all the stuff that the drawing doesn’t account for.’13 Indeed in the present work, (which has a very similar palette to Pricks, 2000, save for the white of the cigarettes, all the other objects are coloured in quite arbitrarily, highlighting the status of the painting as a constructed image which abides by its own rules. This is most obvious in the bunch of bananas (the only natural object in the composition) which are rendered in a striking, primary red. In line with Craig-Martin’s usual working practice, each of the five motifs included in this painting feature in numerous other of his works, where they are depicted individually or combined with other objects. Despite the drawings remaining the same, in different contexts their meanings change entirely, as Craig-Martin explains: ‘They became a kind of vocabulary and I reuse images all the time, I’m taking them and adding them together and I think of what I’m doing as something equivalent to speaking. It’s a kind of visual language. When we are in ordinary conversation we only use a couple hundred words most of the time, there are of course thousands of words but we don’t use most of them, we use a very few but we have very varied conversations by simply reorganizing those small number of words. And I’ve been trying to indicate the same kind of thing through picturing, that by reorganizing these images by changing their inflections, which is their colour, their scale, or whatever it is, which are visual equivalents of things that happen in verbal language, that somehow I could draw out many different meanings from this vocabulary of simple things.’15 In the case of the present work, the pills appear in the earlier painting Innocence & Experience, 1996, where the upended pill-bottle and solitary turned away chair suggest a rather sinister narrative; while the hanging jacket exists as early as 1986, in the form of a painted steel and wood wall sculpture. These five motifs also recur in the same combination in another canvas of the same dimensions and title, which was hung alongside the present work in the exhibition Michael Craig-Martin: Signs of Life at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria in 2006. The present work was first shown in 2000 at the Waddington Galleries exhibition Michael Craig-Martin: Conference. According to the accompanying press release, the title of the show was taken from the show’s largest and most complex painting, Conference, 1999, and, also referred to the way in which the exhibition brought together ‘a group of paintings that seek to engage the viewer in a visual discussion of various themes: including time, violence, history, portraiture, negotiation.’16 This exhibition developed ideas explored in two exhibitions held the previous year in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art and the Peter Blum Gallery (where Conference, 1999 was first shown). The Waddington Gallery press release describing the group of works as ‘the most complex paintings both compositionally and thematically that he has produced to date’.17 In the beginning, the objects Craig-Martin chose to represent were man-made, mostly mass-produced and immediately familiar, however increasingly over the years he has introduced unique or limited edition art objects into his compositions. This can be seen in works such as Common History: Park, 1999, which unites the urinal from Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Fountain, 1971; the pipe from René Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images, 1929; the cans from Jasper Johns’ bronze sculpture Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), 1964; and a glass of water, a reference to his own seminal work An Oak Tree, 1973. Here, alongside other more ordinary objects, Craig-Martin has chosen the sensual, organic curves of an Alvar Aalto Paimio Chair, the original prototype of which is held in the The Museum of Modern Art, New York.