Sir Michael Craig-Martin was born on 28 August 1941 and is an Irish-born contemporary conceptual artist and painter.
19 Facts About Michael Craig-Martin
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Michael Craig-Martin is known for fostering and adopting the Young British Artists, many of whom he taught, and for his conceptual artwork, An Oak Tree.
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Michael Craig-Martin is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths.
4.
Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin, but spent most of his childhood in Washington, DC For eight years, he attended a Roman Catholic school, which was run by nuns, followed by the English Benedictine Priory School, where pupils were encouraged to look at religious imagery in illuminated glass panels and stained-glass windows.
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Michael Craig-Martin gained an interest in art through one of the priests, who was an artist, and was strongly impressed by a display in the Phillips Collection of work by Mark Rothko.
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Michael Craig-Martin's parents had no inclinations towards art, although they did have on display in their home Picasso's Greedy Child.
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In mid-1961 Michael Craig-Martin studied art at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, and in the autumn he began a painting course at Yale University, where the teaching was strongly influenced by the multi-disciplinary experimentation and minimalist theories on colour and form of Josef Albers, a former head of department.
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Michael Craig-Martin later said, "Everything I know about colour comes from that course".
9.
From 1973, Michael Craig-Martin was a tutor at Goldsmiths College and, during the 1980s, was a significant influence on the emerging YBA generation, including Damien Hirst.
10.
Michael Craig-Martin was helpful in promoting the Freeze show to established art-world figures.
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Michael Craig-Martin has been a trustee of the Tate Gallery and is a trustee of the National Art Collections Fund.
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Since 2011, Michael Craig-Martin has been working on powder-coated steel forms that describe everyday objects and appear like line drawings in the air.
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Michael Craig-Martin had his first one-man exhibition at the Rowan Gallery in London in 1969.
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Michael Craig-Martin represented Britain at the Sao Paulo Art Biennial in 1998.
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Michael Craig-Martin made his American debut in the "Projects" series at the Museum of Modern Art.
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Michael Craig-Martin met Jann Hashey while at Yale University, and married her in 1963.
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Michael Craig-Martin is one-eighth Chinese, as his great-grandmother was a native of Wuhan, China.
18.
Michael Craig-Martin was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2001 Birthday Honours.
19.
Michael Craig-Martin was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to art.