Sir Michael Craig-Martin | Deconstructing Seurat (Blue) II

Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE RA (b. 1941) — Deconstructing Seurat (Blue) II, 2004

Sir Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941 and is one of the most significant figures in British contemporary art, best known as the teacher at Goldsmiths, University of London who mentored the generation of Young British Artists — including Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, and Michael Landy — who transformed the international art world in the 1990s. His own practice, spanning six decades, is built around the depiction of everyday objects — lightbulbs, books, trainers, umbrellas — in flat, unmodulated colour fields outlined in black, stripped of shadow, context, and hierarchy. He was appointed CBE in 2001 and knighted in 2016; a major retrospective was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2024.

This second work from the Deconstructing Seurat (Blue) pair, produced in 2004 and published by Alan Cristea Gallery, London, takes Seurat’s figurative beach scenes as its source — the bathers and sunbathers of Une Baignade, Asnières and La Grande Jatte — and translates them into Craig-Martin’s flat graphic vocabulary. The atmospheric pointillist shimmer of Seurat’s technique gives way to bold, saturated colour fields in blue, teal, orange, green, and red, the leisurely figures reduced to clean, unmodulated colour blocks. Signed, dated and numbered in pencil verso from the edition of 40.

Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.

Screenprint in colours on wove paper
Signed, dated and numbered in pencil verso
Edition of 40
Published by Alan Cristea Gallery, London, 2004
95 x 65 cm framed to conservation standards