Michael Craig-Martin review – one style fits all

Royal Academy, London
No everyday object is safe as the veteran artist and YBA mentor deploys his signature graphic technique over and over again in this 60-year-spanning retrospective

Michael Craig-Martin’s pictures are as bright and as boring as he wants them to be. That is his curious wager. Everyday objects reduced to graphic outlines, they are as banal as the ladders, corkscrews, buckets and phones they depict, but laid out across flat planes of dazzling cobalt, emerald, yellow and cerise. The eyes pop, even as the brain shuts down. The artist is in total control.

Irish-born, US-educated, mentor to a generation of YBAs at Goldsmiths, his work in public collections the world over, Craig-Martin, at 83, has had to wait a long time for a full-scale retrospective at the institution to which he has belonged for many years. The Royal Academy show is suitably expansive, and handsomely installed. It ranges from early conceptual works to drawings in fine black tape, computer-generated graphics and innumerable paintings on canvas, aluminium and plain white walls; from ever-changing digital portraits of Zaha Hadid and the Countess of Burlington to an all-together-now cascade of the artist’s motifs, complete with electronic soundtrack, projected in the last darkened gallery.