Sir Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941 and is one of the most significant figures in British contemporary art — best known not only for his own practice but for the generation of artists he mentored at Goldsmiths, University of London, in the late 1980s. Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Michael Landy, and Fiona Rae all passed through his tutelage, and the Young British Artist movement that transformed the international art world in the 1990s is, in large part, his legacy as a teacher as much as his achievement as an artist. Craig-Martin was appointed CBE in 2001 and knighted in 2016; a major retrospective was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2024.
His own practice, spanning more than six decades, is built around the depiction of everyday objects — lightbulbs, books, trainers, umbrellas, filing cabinets, fans — rendered in flat, unmodulated colour fields outlined in black, stripped of shadow, context, and hierarchy. The objects are never arranged into still life; each floats alone, given equal weight regardless of cultural status, the visual language insisting that looking carefully at anything — however mundane — is both a political and a philosophical act. It is a practice that began in dialogue with Conceptualism and has remained, through every shift in the art market around it, consistently and recognisably itself.
His prints, typically produced through Alan Cristea Gallery in London, apply that flat graphic vocabulary to a range of subjects and source material. The Deconstructing Seurat series of 2004 — among the most sought-after of his print editions — takes Georges Seurat's pointillist compositions and translates them into Craig-Martin's own language: the atmospheric shimmer of Seurat's divided colour technique replaced by bold, saturated colour fields separated by clean lines, Seurat's compositional architecture preserved and his technique systematically inverted.
The works available through Creed Gallery are the complete Deconstructing Seurat (Blue) pair, 2004 — the industrial landscape and the bathers scene — both screenprints in colours on wove paper, each signed, dated and numbered in pencil verso from the edition of 40, published by Alan Cristea Gallery, London. Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
