Michael Craig-Martin

Musical Instruments

April 20, 2023 - June 18, 2023

Stockholm

Carling Dalenson is pleased to announce our second exhibition by contemporary British master Michael Craig-Martin, “Musical Instruments.”

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. 

Carling Dalenson is delighted to exhibit “Musical Instruments”, which is Michael Craig-Martins second exhibition in the Nordics and with Carling Dalenson Gallery, and will consist of a group of colourful new works. Just like his previous exhibition with Carling Dalenson and many of his shows around the world, this exhibition will focus on paintings of objects, and our attachment to them throughout our lives, however, this exhibition is dedicated to music and playing of instruments, and the “objects” will thus only consist of different musical instruments.

The term “Transitional Objects” was coined by the innovative British paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. He considered that ‘play' was the key to emotional and psychological well-being at all ages, that it was only in play that people are entirely their true selves. He saw the arts as a manifestation of adult play. 

For him a child’s first deeply loved toy or object was ‘transitional’ in that it could act as the earliest bridge between self and other, between the child's ego centric imagination and the real world outside the child.

“I think this is an interesting way to think about our attachment to objects, and I like the resonant ambiguity of the term ’transitional' when applied both to the objects I depict and the objects I make, the paintings.”
- Michael Craig-Martin