The Irish-born British artist Michael Craig-Martin has been awarded his Knighthood by Prince William (The Duke Of Cambridge . Martin known for creating images from everyday objects and credited with teaching Young British Artists like Damien Hirst in the late 1980s. Sir Michael said receiving his knighthood from William was “very special”. Asked if there was a place for his work at Buckingham Palace, he said: “I would be happy to lend them something. “Say if something was being restored and they had a gap, I could offer to lend a work … I’d let them choose which one.”
Michael Craig-Martin, a truly influential artist, was awarded a Knighthood, in the Queen’s birthday honours list. As the ultimate catalyst for creativity and innovation, Craig-Martin received a CBE for his services to art in 2001 and is well known for his use of intense and vivid colour Mr. Craig-Martin was born in Dublin Ireland in 1941. He grew up and was educated in the United States, studying Fine Art at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. He has lived and worked in Britain since 1966.
Over the past forty-two years, he has had numerous exhibitions and installations in galleries and museums across the world, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and MoMA, New York, the Kunstvereins in Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, and Hannover, at IVAM in Valencia, and Kunsthaus Bregenz. He represented Britain in the 23rd Sao Paulo Biennal. A retrospective of his work was presented at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1989, and a second at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2006, and a third at the Serpentine gallery, London, in 2015.
He had his first one-man exhibition at the Rowan Gallery in London in 1969. Since then he has shown regularly both in the UK and abroad. Most notably there was a major retrospective of his work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1989, and in 1991 he showed wall drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Group exhibitions include the British conceptual exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1972, The New Art, and the 1996 exhibition Un siecle de sculpture Anglaise at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. He was the British representative at the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1998.
Craig-Martin is also widely recognised as an effective and influential teacher. His teaching career started in 1966, but it is his period at Goldsmiths College, London for which he is best known. His former students include many of those artists who made such a significant impact on the art scene in the 1990s; these include Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas.
He has curated exhibitions, including Drawing the Line, which toured venues including the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1995. He has also published many articles and essays and was a Trustee of the Tate Gallery.