Michael Craig-Martin
'Understanding' art is like having a sense of humour - if you don't have one, no amount of explanation is going to make you laugh.Collection: Art
You can see in my paintings, I've taken away the context, I've taken away the shadows, I've taken away expression, I've taken away the personal, and yet so much remains!Collection: Taken
I am trying to present objects in the simplest way possible, and I don't want to supply too much context.Collection: Trying
I try to make images that have the immediate presence we take for granted in objects - a chair, a shoe, a book, a Judd - and compose them like sentences.Collection: Art
Art is more to do with observation than invention.Collection: Art
I thought the objects we value least because they were ubiquitous were actually the most extraordinary.Collection: Ubiquity
The art world, of all worlds, has room for everyone.Collection: Art
I decided I should use the most obvious colours - the basic colours with simple names: red, purple, yellow, pink. I don't distort the objects, I don't change the objects, I draw them exactly as they are. I do the opposite with the colours.Collection: Simple
When I was teaching I often said to students that you are trying to be too creative, don't be too creative, because there is so much already in what you are making, you don't need to do very much. You just need to do a little bit, and that is a lot.Collection: Teaching
If things are too similar, the dialogue is not very interesting. If you put in contrast, big and small, abstract and representational, you set up the possibility of a discourse.Collection: Interesting
I think the best approach is not to be too much like the thing that they are referring to, see it as a guide.Collection: Thinking
If you close the door to the things you feel comfortable with, you will never discover the truth about yourself.Collection: Doors
As an artist you are free to use any image, any style, any idea from any culture and any period of history.Collection: Artist
I think from an artist's point of view, everything in art, in fact everything in the world is available as material.Collection: Art
The viewer brings all additional information to the image.Collection: Information
Whatever happens to the art world, art will go on regardless. As for obscurity, it looms just over the horizon beckoning us all. Why worry.Collection: Art
You can't force yourself to be something you are not.Collection: Force
If you try to copy something exactly you won't get it correct, because you don't share the same tradition and context.Collection: Trying
If I did not love the things that I do, how could I spend my life doing this? You have to invest what you spend your life doing with pleasure.Collection: Pleasure
I have been using the computer as a work aid since the mid-90's. It is extraordinarily well suited to how I think and work and has transformed my practice. Nearly everything I have done in the past 15 years would have been impossible without it. I use the computer for drawing, composing and colour planning everything, from postage stamps to paintings to architectural-scale installations.Collection: Past
The identifying personal association with objects, which are not personal, is an important modern experience - our real association, the strands of our feelings about the objects that surround us. It's also because they are so familiar, we don't think of them as important in the world, but actually they are the world. We are living in a very material world.Collection: Real
The complexity of the language of images is disguised by the ease and rapidity with which we read them. I've tried to make work that is as transparent and simple as possible. No matter how much I strip away the result is always more complex to me than I expect.Collection: Simple
In the late 70's I started to make drawings of the ordinary objects I had been using in my work. Initially I wanted them to be ready-made drawings of the kind of common objects I had always used in my work. I was surprised to discover I couldn't find the simple, neutral drawings I had assumed existed, so I started to make them myself.Collection: Simple
I came to painting through sculpture, to images through objects. I think that images sit in the middle, somewhere between objects and words.Collection: Thinking
All the basic information should be in the object itself.Collection: Information
Usually people start with painting and then go on to make installations; my painting came from installation.Collection: People
In Britain the power of authority was weakened. There was much more individual freedom and there was great academic freedom.Collection: Academic Freedom
There is a complete difference between art and the art market. Prices are high now for the simple reason that there are people are willing to pay them. The market dominates the art world today because at the moment collectors call the shots. Like everything else that won't last forever.Collection: Art
I was poorer than anyone I'd ever met. But it was a great time to be a young artist - I remember it as a period of exceptional creative freedom and adventure, when one was regularly presented with works of art unlike anything one had ever seen before.Collection: Art
The internet has extended the possibility of making art to more people, and particularly of enabling it to be seen by others. I am sure the internet is having a profound impact on art, particularly those who have grown up with it, but making good art will remain as difficult (and as easy) as it ever was. Having a lasting impact may become more not less difficult.Collection: Art
It's important for me to give each thing the possibility to speak and also to allow artworks speak to each other.Collection: Giving
I wanted to make new works of very contemporary objects, which I thought was interesting because many of them are manufactured in China, but these objects are universal, they go across all languages, all cultures.Collection: Interesting
For example, in England, we teach about Expressionism, but it is not the same in England as it is in Germany, because Expressionism is more important in the history of German art. So although it is the same history, the emphasis is different.Collection: Art
[I] don't want people to see it [paintings] as a specific intention on my part. If somebody has that interest in these objects, of course they can see that, but from my own point of view, I'd rather stay as neutral as possible.Collection: Views
You can't honour someone by copying them or trying to be exactly like them.Collection: Trying
Sometimes we look at a work of art and we immediately think that it is German art, but with some we don't, it's not so obvious.Collection: Art
In the studio, it took me a long time to work out how to make paintings that had the intensity that I was able to create by painting whole rooms. There is a very limited number of colours but there are many variations. I decided to use the purest palette that I could.Collection: Numbers
In a sense [Joseph] Albers was an authoritarian teacher. He had rules about most things and very definite ideas.Collection: Teacher
When I started teaching in the late 60s, in a time of student revolutions and changes, they changed in question of society and authority.Collection: Teaching
When I told people that I was going to paint the big room magenta, many people thought that I was crazy.Collection: Crazy
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is very difficult to hang because it is so large and the quality is very varied. There are 1,200 works, an almost impossible number, some are interesting and some are not.Collection: Summer
I had been doing wall drawings, but they were always black and white. Then in 1993 I painted all the walls of a room to make an installation and as soon as I saw the colour on the walls, it changed my whole life.Collection: Wall
There is no doubt when one comes from the West to China one understands pop art as having originally developed as part of Western tradition. There is a historical development, in which things find resonance in different places.Collection: Art
In my early work I didn't use much colour. I had no confidence about how I could do this.Collection: Use
When I was in Wuhan, I went to the art school, which was one of the most important art schools in China, an enormous art school. One of the things that I saw is that the schools are very big and there are so many students. It is very difficult to me to teach creative activity to great numbers of people, because I think you need personal contact with students, you need to speak individually, you need individual contact between teachers and students, you need continuity. To me this is a problem in mass education in every society now.Collection: Teacher
If you were really interested in being creative in teaching, it was possible to try new methods and that was really what we did in Goldsmiths - we used the freedom of the time.Collection: Teaching
I've taken away everything I could think of, and yet what remains is enough. These days many more people come to my work, and once they see my work they will always recognize it.Collection: Taken
There was something really wonderful about being able to feel confident about doing my first exhibition in China, that people would have no trouble recognising the images and understanding my work. I also have a lot of freedom in the way I use colour, and I think that kind of freedom in colour is also understandable in every culture.Collection: Thinking
At the Summer Exhibition, I didn't really change anything; it's the same exhibition. All I changed is the presentation. I didn't really change the rules.Collection: Summer
I had my exhibition of paintings first in Shanghai, and then recently in Wuhan. Wuhan particularly interested me, because I am 1/8 Chinese.Collection: Chinese