Transience

This new Michael Craig-Martin catalogue is produced to accompany the artist's exhibition Transience at the Serpentine Gallery, which focuses on drawings and paintings from 1981 to the present day that chart developments in technology.

This publication includes a foreword by Serpentine Galleries Directors Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Marco Livingstone has contributed a new essay titled A perfect world, just out of reach which situates Craig-Martin’s practice within a wider art historical perspective. For her text Objects in transition, design critic Alice Rawsthorn charts the Darwinian demise and survival of everyday objects in the face of new technologies. In conversation with artist Liam Gillick, Craig-Martin discusses a number of works in the exhibition and the shifts in technology over recent decades that have shaped his choice of subject matter and drawing practice. A timeline of significant world events and inventions from the period covered by the exhibition (1981-2015) also contextualises the appearance of certain objects within Craig-Martin’s work.

Note: only the plug socket cover is available. 

Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin's (b. Dublin, 1941) early works explore the conceptual possibilities of contemporary art, testing the boundaries between functional and functionless forms. The introduction of digital technology in recent years has resulted in the breakdown of the relationship between form and function, a process that Craig-Martin captures in his depictions of successive inventions, from the battery, to the cassette, to the laptop.

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