Housework

Location

Country: Austria
City: Vienna
Place: British Embassy

In this bold painting by Michael Craig-Martin, ordinary objects are depicted against a coloured background, neither touching nor overlapping one another. These discrete images appear unrelated to each other conceptually as well as compositionally: what exactly links a saucepan with a piano? The disparity of scale adds to our sense that the artist's choice of objects was arbitrary. Craig-Martin typically works with a restricted (but vivid) palette of colours and repertoire of images. He views his works as "pictorial readymades", referring to the practice of elevating ordinary objects to the status of "Art", simply by virtue of having been selected by the artist.

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

piano, saucepan, handcuffs, cabinet

Materials & Techniques

acrylic (paint), canvas, acrylic painting

Artist

Michael Craig-Martin (1941 - )

Title

Housework

Date

1997

Medium

Acrylic on canvas

Dimensions

height: 198.50 cm, width: 152.50 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Waddington Galleries, March 1998

Inscription

None

Provenance

The artist; purchased from Waddington Galleries 1998

GAC number

17308