A Quote by Michael Craig-Martin

The first exhibition that I used bright colours in painting the room was at a gallery in Paris, and there were seven rooms in the gallery. It was very nice gallery, not very big rooms, around the courtyard, it was a very French space. So I painted each room in different colour. When people came to the exhibition, I saw they came with a smile. Everybody smiles - this is something I never saw in my work before.
When I stepped back from the gallery I was in a phase where I thought I wasn't going to be making work for a gallery context for a while. People were like, "You should never leave a gallery if you didn't have somewhere else to go," but I wasn't trying to disrespect the gallerists in that way.
When I found out after that first successful exhibition that the gallery wanted me to do another show like the first one, I come out two years later with four 6-foot drawings of classical nudes masturbating. The gallery director flipped the freak out!
I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York.
Public art is a unique type of art. It's very different to gallery art because it is something that we pass by every day and it inevitably creates a lot of discussion in a way that gallery art does not.
I hate sentiment when it's inappropriate. I saw someone who went and saw an exhibition and came out in tears. If an exhibition drives you to tears you need to see a psychiatrist immediately. That's what I think.
I visit a lot of art galleries. I live in Dublin and there's a very good gallery called the Kevin Kavanagh gallery.
I've been collecting photos for a long time, I mean since I started making money. But what you have had to go through to find a good photo is like a needle in the haystack sometimes. You'll drive from one gallery to the next gallery to the next gallery. It's not an easy process. It's a very ancient model that just hasn't caught up with the times.
The city's the best gallery I could imagine. I would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people. I would control it directly with the public in the streets.
A number of years ago, when I had an exhibition of my work, the people in charge who came to pick up my manuscripts saw them piled up haphazardly in the garage and were shocked. 'What? They'll grow mold like this!' they said. People who do things properly apparently make a dedicated manuscript room, where they can control humidity.
I remember when I went to a gallery in Paris at one point, they had drawings of earthworks set in different places. I asked the person sitting at the gallery desk where these works were - where in France they could be found. She looked at me in horror as if I'd asked something completely insane. She said, "Well, of course, these works don't actually exist. They're concepts."
I remember we were out on the road when the album finally came out in February 1973. I listened to it in my hotel room and just got this really big smile. I was thinking, 'It's amazing, we're really pulling this off'. The album was very, very unique and very, very different. I was really proud of the songs, especially 'No More Mr Nice Guy', 'Billion Dollar Babies' and 'Generation Landslide'.
The Church is not a gallery for the exhibition of eminent Christians, but a school for the education of imperfect ones.
I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.
I did a different size of photograph at the FIAT gallery - this time the images are 30" by 40," so they're maybe like four times the size of images I've shown before in a gallery. I just saw them now, and once they're in the mat and the frame, they're just beautiful. It's funny because even though it's closer to life-sized, to me anyway, they become not necessarily anymore about the person, but they almost become a little more heroic.
I planned the exhibition so that it becomes a story where the viewer travels through these islands [of ideas]. Whether the contents of each chapter came first or the artist came first in making the decision was different in each case.
In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared. We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.
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