MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN
Common History
November 20 through January 22, 2000
Peter Blum is pleased to announce the exhbition Common History by British artist Michael Craig-Martin. The exhibition and installlation, which features recent large-scale wall paintings and works on canvas, opens on Saturday, November 20, at 99 Wooster Street and continues to January 22.
In Craig-Martin's exhibition, Common History, the entire gallery is transformed by intenselt colored walls, predominately painted in magenta and yellow, along with specific and familiar objects rendered mural-like and in various scale: a camera, a pair of ale cans, a pipe, urinal, a glass of water, a faucet, chair and ladder, a spilled bottle of pills are also painted directly onto the wall. Many of these same images appear in several of the six works on canvas as well, as a kind of hybrid formation suggesting multiple references-from their everyday objecthood and toward art and art history (Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Jasper Johns). In his work, Craig-Martin alters our perception of the material world, to make us look at everyday objects as aesthetic phenomena, and to sharpen our senses and activate our imaginations.
For over the past thirty years Michael Craig-Martin has addressed fundamental issues concerning the nature of art, its mode representation, the question of authorship and the role of the viewer. From his early conceptual works, his later wall drawings of everyday objects, to his now vividly colorful room installations-Michael Craig-Martin has explored the subtle balance between the artificial and the real, between painted and real object, painting and architecture.
Born in Dublin in 1944, Michael Craig-Martin grew up and was educated in the United States, studying Fine Art at the Yale University of Art and Architecture. He moved to Britain in 1966. His first solo exhibition was at the Rowan Gallery, London, in 1969 and was included in the definitive exhibition of British conceptual art, The New Art, at the Hayward Gallery in 1972. A major retrospective of his work was held in London at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1989. In 1991, he showed new wall drawings in the Project Gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1997 he created two temporary installations in situ at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf and for the Buxtehude Museum (until 2000). In the summer of 1998 his exhibition Always Now was presented at the Kunstverein Hannover. He was selected as the British representative at the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1998. A major installation of Craig-Martin's work will be featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 1999 for its MoMA 2000 millenium exhibitions, "People, Things, Places" organized by curator John Elderfield.
For further information or visual materials please contact Peter Blum. Telephone: 212 343 0441, Fax: 212 343 0523. Gallery hours: Tuesday through Friday 10:00 am to 6:00 pm, Saturday 11:00 am to 6:00 pm, and Monday by appointment.