When it comes to painting, there’s nowhere in London to rival the spectacular setting of the Royal Academy ’s Main Galleries, which have never looked more splendid than they do now as the backdrop for a major celebration of the 60-year career of Michael Craig-Martin RA. For many, Craig-Martin (b 1941) is all about colour, and on this the exhibition delivers, reaching an ecstatic high point in the magnificent barn of the central gallery, where his famously diagrammatic paintings of ordinary objects, rendered in black lines and play-school colours, are set against walls painted an astonishing emerald green. If this doesn’t send you weak at the knees, the next room surely will, its walls a radioactive fuchsia that actually – honestly – turns the air pink.
But that’s to jump ahead. First, we go right back to the beginning, to when Craig-Martin was making technical-looking drawings on isometric graph paper, and made austere-looking sculptures from everyday objects, instead of painting them in all the colours. Perhaps ironically, it was the smallest and quietest of these sculptures that first brought the artist to the attention of the art world and beyond.
Writing in the exhibition catalogue, veteran art critic Richard Cork recalls how in 1973, frustrated visitors walked out of the Rowan Gallery, in London, concluding that it was empty. Those that noticed the glass of water on a shelf mounted high up on a wall near the entrance were perplexed, and according to temperame.