Sir Michael Craig-Martin RA is an Irish-born conceptual artist and painter. He was born in Dublin in 1941, though he grew up in the United States. He studied Fine Art at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Since 1966, Craig-Martin has lived and worked in Britain. His first solo exhibition was at the Rowan Gallery, London, in 1969. Since then, he has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA in New York, and many other important museums in Europe. Craig-Martin taught at Goldsmiths College for many years, and he is widely acknowledged as a formative influence on the ‘Young British Artists’, including Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas. There have been two major retrospectives of his work, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (1989) and the Irish Museum of Modern Arts in Dublin (2006). In 2014, the Serpentine Gallery in London held a major exhibition of his recent work. He was elected as a Royal Academician in 2006. Craig-Martin’s work has developed from an ascetic style of conceptualism into a vibrant, colourful and insightful practice. He is particularly noted for his work, An Oak Tree (1973, Tate Collection), which decisively shaped the emergence of language-based conceptual art of the time. The work consists of a glass of water, placed on a floating glass shelf, and a label which explains that the glass of water is in fact an oak tree. Craig-Martin started making pictures in the late 1970s, first working on canvas and, from the 2000s, on aluminium. His treatment of acrylic gives his more recent work a piquant saturation of colour and a striking visual immediacy. The level of precision demonstrated in his most recent works marks Craig-Martin as one of the most notable technicians practising today. Untitled (Sardine Tin/Handcuff) is a large and important work of Michael Craig-Martin’s mature period. Though he has long used a consistent style of bright colour and stylised outlines, his output has undergone a series of subtle stylistic developments. This work represents a witty development in the artist’s style of composition. Where Knowing (1996, Tate Collection) places a series of objects in their own space over the canvas, and where Inhale (Yellow) (2002, Manchester City Art Gallery) fills the picture surface with a cacophony of objects, Untitled (Sardine Tin/Handcuff) places two objects in sharp juxtaposition. The two halves of the picture sit together in a playful bricolage. The lack of any obvious relationship between the handcuff and the empty sardine tin is at once a philosophical conundrum and an arresting, carefully weighted image. Craig-Martin has been using sharp outlines in his work since the late 1970s. In the early 1980s he added strident colours, acid and pastel hues brought together in a crunch of carefully separated polychromy. Though his style is forthright and visually gratifying, his practice is underpinned by critical conceptual values. In 1972, he participated in The New Art, an important Hayward Gallery exhibition that marked him out alongside Gilbert & George and Keith Arnatt as a leading proponent of British conceptualism. Over a career spanning half a century, he has retained this position as one of the foremost British artists of his generation.