Golf ball

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, 100 Parliament Street

Twelve types of sports balls are presented in Michael Craig-Martin's series of vibrant screenprints. Each ball is centred on a bright light blue square-format background. Over the last 30 years, Craig-Martin has established a hallmark style of precisely drawn objects, with bold outlines delimiting flat planes of vibrant colour. His subjects are always everyday objects, combining the painterly tradition of the ‘still life’ and Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the ready-made. 

Craig-Martin explains how this artistic language is intended as a neutral mode of representation:

I didn’t want them to look personal. There’s very little information in these works, the information is in the viewer.

As such, the meanings we ascribe to these objects are projections on the part of the viewer. In this regard, he elaborates:

I try to get rid of as much meaning as I can. People’s need to find meanings, to create associations, renders this impossible. Meaning is both persistent and unstable.

A hugely influential figure in the art world, Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin, grew up in the United States, and has lived in Britain since 1966. Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1989), the Serpentine Gallery (2015), and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016). His exhibitions have included large-scale wall drawings in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and wall paintings at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He is widely acknowledged for his influence as a teacher at Goldsmiths’ College in London, where he taught from the early 1970s and remains Professor Emeritus of Fine Art. Young British Artists’ Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas number among his former pupils. Craig-Martin was a Trustee of the Tate between 1989-1999 and was made a CBE in 2001.

Places

Subjects

sport & outdoor activities, sporting equipment, golf

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), print (as object name), screenprint, cotton paper, Somerset Satin

Artist

Michael Craig-Martin (1941 - )

Title

Golf ball

Portfolio Title

Sports Balls

Edition

One in an edition of 15

Date

2019

Medium

screenprint on paper

Dimensions

height: 40 cm; width: 40 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Cristea Roberts Gallery, May 2020

Provenance

Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, UK; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 28 May 2020

GAC number

18862/1