Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin (b.1941).  

Irish artist, writer, and teacher. He was born in Dublin, moved to the USA as a child, and studied at Yale University, where he encountered an important early influence, John Cage's ‘Lecture on Nothing’ (1949). ‘Life without structure is unseen. Structure without life is dead.’ Although Josef Albers was no longer there in person, his teaching system remained and Craig-Martin was impressed by the ‘intellectual coherence’ of his view of art (Tusa). In 1966 he settled in England, where he became one of the leading figures in *Conceptual art. His work was less concerned with verbal language than that of some of his contemporaries, more with developing the minimal box forms of Judd and Morris by introducing elements of paradox and spectator participation, as with the Box that Never Closes (1967, Swindon Museum and Art Gallery).