Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy: an 'inescapably joyful' exhibition

'Career-spanning retrospective' features early avant-garde experiments and immersive digital works

Michael Craig-Martin, Common History: Conference, 1999
Craig-Martin is a 'craftier artist' than his detractors allow
(Image credit: Michael Craig-Martin / Gagosian)

Now 83, the Irish-born artist Michael Craig-Martin has waited a long time for this "career-spanning retrospective" at the Royal Academy, said Nancy Durrant in the London Evening Standard.

Craig-Martin is probably best known as the "beloved tutor" to Damien Hirst and other Young British Artists in the 1980s – a role that has sometimes eclipsed his own not inconsiderable achievements. 

In the late 1960s and early 1970s he became renowned as a conceptual artist, making headlines with "thought-provoking" works. Yet soon Craig-Martin changed tack and returned in the late 1970s to painting and drawing – creating recognisable images of everyday objects, from cassettes to shoes to smartphones and polystyrene cups, rendered unmistakably his own on account of the "vivid", candy-coloured palette he uses. 

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Sadly, his conceptual stage is confined to one room, leaving the RA's huge gallery spaces packed with the artist's trademark "safety pins, forks, iPhones, wheelie suitcases" and so on, all depicted in "neon-bright colours", "with a designer's precise perspective in a cool, clinical style". Craig-Martin has adhered to this formula for decades, and it ultimately seems "gapingly empty".

His pictures are akin to contemporary still lifes: certain paintings – of "pills, a facemask, a syringe" – allude to "disease and death"; an "acid-green corkscrew" evokes a skeleton. "Eye of the Storm" (2002) – one of his most "forceful" paintings – depicts a chaotic vortex of household goods, suggesting "a disturbing close-up of landfill, groaning with imperishable junk". The message, it seems, is: "Here is our world. And it's heading for the tip."