Collection: Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin (born 1941) is an Irish-born British artist whose work has been central to conceptual and post-conceptual practice in Britain since the late 1960s. His 1973 work An Oak Tree — a glass of water on a shelf, accompanied by a text asserting it had been transformed into an oak tree — remains one of the most concise and debated propositions in British conceptual art, testing the limits of belief, authority and the definition of the artwork. Craig-Martin was also an influential teacher at Goldsmiths, where he taught many of the artists who would become associated with the Young British Artists in the late 1980s and 1990s. His later practice moved towards large-scale paintings and installations of everyday objects rendered in flat, vivid colour.