Tulips (after Mapplethorpe)

2016

inkjet on Somerset, 29 x 29cm

For the Turkish Tulips exhibition the artist has found a way to maintain his artistic proposition of only making images of fabricated, non-natural objects by taking his picture of tulips from the well-known photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, rather than from actual flowers.

Born in Dublin in 1941 and educated in the United States, he returned to Europe in the mid-1960s and was a key figure in the first generation of British conceptual artists. As a tutor at Goldsmith’s College from 1974–88 and 1994–2000, he had a significant influence on two generations of young British artists.

Throughout his career Craig-Martin has explored the visual, linguistic, and referential character of everyday objects which he has realised through a variety of media including paintings, sculpture, prints and computer animations. His work is held in numerous museum collections around the world including Tate, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and MoMA, New York.