Michael Craig-Martin
Said a glass of water was an oak tree, then drew everyday objects in flat line and hot colour.
Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941, raised largely in the United States and trained at Yale, and settled in Britain in 1966. An Oak Tree of 1973 — a glass of water on a glass shelf, accompanied by a text in which the artist states that it is an oak tree — is the conceptual work he is best known for. Alongside it runs the practice that fills the walls: ordinary manufactured objects, a lightbulb, a safety pin, a pair of spectacles, a filing cabinet, drawn in flat unmodulated line and set against saturated colour. He taught at Goldsmiths through the 1980s, where his students included Damien Hirst, and was knighted in 2016.
The graphic clarity of the work makes condition unusually visible: the colour fields are flat acrylic or vinyl and every knock, retouch and edge repair shows. A great deal of the market is editioned — screenprints, and wall works and installations issued with instructions rather than as objects — and it is worth being precise about which of these is being offered, because a work that consists of a certificate and a set of instructions is bought and sold in a different way from a canvas. Signature, edition and the studio's documentation are the reference.
If you own a work by Michael Craig-Martin
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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