Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin
Credit Card, 2014

From a series of 12 screen prints on 410gsm Somerset Satin paper, paper and image edition of 50.  £7,500 for the series
50 x 50cm (each)

 Courtesy of the artist and Alan Cristea Gallery

Michael Craig-Martin advocates an understanding and appreciation of ordinary, mass-produced, man-made objects and celebrates their worth by recreating them as paintings of vivid, intense hues or constructs them in colourful, sculptural form. 
  Craig-Martin created a series of 12 images (Objects of Our Time) to reflect as wide a range of contemporary life as possible.  The images were chosen instinctively and include travel, fashion, take-away coffee, bling, battery dependence and a credit card, the latter considered ideally suited: "There is surely no object that represents contemporary life better." 
  Instead of depicting the front of the card, which is always designed by the issuer to be identified as theirs, Craig-Martin portrayed the reverse of the card on the grounds that it’s always the same and easily recognisable.  This is the quality he values in the everyday object: its universal familiarity, which presents no linguistic or cultural barrier.  

Craig-Martin is the Chief Co-ordinator of the 2015 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Hedge, issue 36, August 2015, pp60-68