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THE multi-roomed exhibition space looks like the warehouse of some strange collector, featuring artifacts such as an open book painted on a 2-meter-tall pinkish purple canvas that seems to draw the audience into its world; or a pack of green fries; a multi-colored computer mouse, its streamlined profile highlighted.
All 52 paintings of various sizes are named “Untitled,” and each contains only one object, realistically rendered, yet filled with a color not usually associated with it.
“I want this exhibition to offer a picture of contemporary life as we know it today — ‘NOW’!” says their creator, Irish-born conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin, explaining why the exhibition is called, appropriately enough, “NOW.”
“In my work I try to look beyond the ways mass-produced objects are usually thought of — as crass examples of consumerism or as design icons, or expressions of good taste or bad — to try to locate something of their essence.”
The 73-year-old, acclaimed as the Godfather of Brit Art, this week saw his first solo exhibition in Asia open at the Himalayas Museum in Shanghai. The majority of works featured have been created specifically for the show over the past two years, since Craig-Martin first visited the exhibition space.
“I didn’t want to have an exhibition that was a retrospective of my works from different times. I think it is more important to have an exhibition that has a singular focus,” he told Shanghai Daily at the opening on Tuesday. “What I’ve been trying to do in the last few years is to focus on the essence of what I’m working, which is one object to one painting.”
The exhibition will run through March 31, before moving to the Hubei Museum in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, where Craig-Martin’s great-grandfather once worked as a customs officer and married his Chinese great-grandmother.
“I use the most intense value of each color because I want your experience of looking at the picture to be the most intense experience that I can give you,” he says in explanation of his vivid and intriguing use of color.
“It seems to me that using the most intensity of each color makes pictures hold your eyes, hold your imagination. When I was a student, I had a tutor who told me I shouldn’t use a lot of bright colors in the same painting.
“Sometimes, it’s a good idea not to pay any attention to the teacher,” he adds wryly.
Teaching is something Craig-Martin knows a thing or two about as the Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College of Art is among the best-known and most respected art instructors of his time.
He is noted for fostering the Young British Artists — or YBAs — group, who emerged in the late 1980s.
Including former Goldsmiths students such as Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume, YBAs dominated the art scene in 1990s Britain. Their rise to prominence began with the Hirst-led Freeze exhibition, with Craig-Martin using his influence to introduce contributors to important figures in the London art world.
Craig-Martin was already an influential artist, especially known for his 1973 installation “An Oak Tree.”
The piece was essentially a glass of water on a shelf, accompanied by a text written in the form of Q&A explaining why it is an oak tree rather than a glass of water.
“No. It’s not a symbol. I’ve changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree,” one answer from the text states.
When asked about this early work, Craig-Martin says, “Somehow in art, you have to believe it. You have to allow belief to occur, and belief occurs between the object and the audience, between you and your audience.
“If you go to an exhibition, and it’s empty for you, the work has not spoken to you, it doesn’t work. If you go to an exhibition, and you see the work, and it speaks, it means it works. But it’s up to you to bring this belief,” he explains.
Born in Dublin, Craig-Martin moved to the United States as a toddler and studied fine art at Yale. After returning to Europe in the mid-1960s, he became one of the key figures in the first generation of British conceptual artists.
Although a prominent figure in his field, Craig-Martin still considers it “very difficult to be an artist in any country.”
“I never advise any student to become an artist,” he adds. “It is very difficult to make a living.
“Many people today think what’s important is networking, about galleries, about critics and curators. All of that is important, but none of them are important if you don’t have good work.
“And the only person who is responsible for making good work is you, the artist. That is your big responsibility. And I do believe if your work is good, people will recognize that, and people will come to you,” he says.
Since late 1960s, Craig-Martin has shown an increasing interest in the use of ordinary household objects. He started making line drawings of such objects in 1978, around the time he drew the open book included in the current exhibition.
At the time, it never occurred to him that some of the objects he drew would no longer exist in a few years.
“The objects I chose were commonplace, easily recognizable, man-made. They were generally mass-produced and commercially modest,” he adds.
“What happened in the last 15 or 20 years is objects have been changed. The nature of art is changed. Of course the culture, the life of world is changed too, and the object itself. So now many of the objects are electronic ones, expensive and yet you can’t make a picture of contemporary life without including laptops and phones. They are recognized by everybody.”
In 2012, Craig-Martin viewed the work of more than 3,000 Chinese artists, as a judge for the John Moores New Painting Prize (China), and was amazed by the drawing skills.
“We picked 60 paintings and put them around the room. And I noticed something very important,” he recalls. “Wonderful drawing, very little color. Much less confidence in using color. And it seems to me that it must reflect something in teaching, in a way. I hope my own exhibition will encourage artists here to look differently about the use of color.”