Michael Craig-Martin

Commissioned for The Ivy Restaurant, 1990

Unframed. The original canvas is securely laid down onto the stable supporting boards. There is general surface dirt and detritus scattered across the work, particularly along the upper horizontal edges. There is a small knock to the right edge of the left panel. On close examination there is a fine line of craquelure at the right edge of the left panel Subject to the above the work appears to be in good condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of retouching. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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In 1991 Craig-Martin dispensed with images of objects and executed a sequence of monochromatic paintings, their surfaces uniformly covered with rows and columns of white dashes. Richard Cork notes that these pictures constituted a return to the fascination with the idea of the repeated unit, which he has previously explored in his Venetian-blind series. The ambition behind them, as Craig-Martin recalled, came from a desire to make paintings that would stand only for themselves, the most basic paintings he could imagine, where every part of the picture was the same as every other part.  He reduced the lines formed by the tape, which he had used for years when making images, to a simple dash – each created paradoxically by the removal of paint and the exposure of the gessoed canvas beneath. This body of work culminated in a set of nine large and completely identical paintings shown at Waddington Galleries in 1991. Executed in oxide red with white dashes, these works share the same palette as the present lot. This series of paintings proved to be immensely therapeutic for Craig-Martin to conceive and execute.  He saw himself as a composer, and sometimes the dash paintings look like musical scores. They appear to be sending messages, precise yet indecipherable (Richard Cork, Michael Craig-Martin, Thames and Hudson, London, 2006, pp.92-93).