Artist Michael Craig-Martin talks creativity, minimalism, and modernist furniture on The Modern House Podcast
This month’s guest on The Modern House Podcast is the internationally-renowned conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin, who shares with us his favourite living spaces and reflects on his life, career and love of modernist design. Listen to the podcast here.
We
first got to know Craig-Martin when he sold his house and studio through our agency in 2013. The pared-back space,
which was designed by his friend John Pawson, occupies a Victorian industrial
space in Kentish Town, north London, converted when Pawson was still an
up-and-coming name in 1986. It’s a seemingly-simple but drilled-down space,
which exhibits many of the considerations found in the artist’s own work: a
preoccupation with detail, line, space and minimalist forms.
Where
it differs, however, is in its colour – a markedly more neutral tone when
compared to Craig-Martin’s work. Since the 1990s, his paintings have become
synonymous with bold, graphic-like renders of everyday objects that have been
coloured in unrecognisable ways using cartoonish hues. An X-Box controller,
tape cassette, lightbulb, suitcase, door handle and computer mouse have all
been given the Craig-Martin treatment – “I never draw anything you can’t name
in a fraction of a second,” he says, “[but] whereas the drawing is
reassuringly familiar, the colour is unfamiliar.”
His
2017 Design and Architecture series comprised
four diptychs of famous modernist houses and the furniture of their designers,
so that Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe appears next to the Barcelona
daybed, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater is paired with his Johnson Wax
desk. The work speaks to Craig-Martin’s love of modernist design, which he
says, “still epitomises our whole idea of what it means to be modern”, and has
filled all his living spaces over the years, with pieces by Le Corbusier and
Eames being enduring favourites.
Hear more by listening to the podcast, in which Craig-Martin also tells us what it was like to teach the YBA artists Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas in the mid-1980s, and explains the thought process behind his most famous work, the conceptual masterpiece, An Oak Tree. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode, and if you could rate and review us, we’d be more than grateful. As ever, happy listening.
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