Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin, Ireland, but spent most his school years in Washington DC, as well as Bogota, Colombia. He studied literature and history at Fordham University, and art and painting at both the Academie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and at Yale University in the United States. Settling in London in the mid-1960s, Craig-Martin began his career producing box-like conceptual works, and later quotidian household objects. In the late 1970s, Craig-Martin’s work gravitated towards simple line drawings of such objects. These works became the basis for a vocabulary of images which have served as the foundation of his subsequent work. 

For over forty years he has continuously had exhibitions and installations in international institutions such as the Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, MoMA, New York, the Kunstverein in Dusseldorf, Stuttgart and Hannover, at Kunsthaus Bregenz and IVAM in Valencia. Craig-Martin represented Britain in the 23rd Sao Paulo Biennial and has had a retrospective of his work presented three times: at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1989, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2006, and at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2015. 

Alongside his personal artistic success, Michael Craig-Martin is arguably one of the most influential teachers in contemporary British art, tutoring artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Gary Hume, as a part of the generation known as “Young British Artists”, at Goldsmiths University. Craig-Martin is today a Professor Emeritus at that same institution.