Michael Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941 and educated in the United States, where he studied at Yale University. 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 1974-1988 and 1994-2000, he had a significant influence on two generations of young British artists.
Throughout his career Craig-Martin has explored the aesthetic and linguistic character of everyday, designer and iconic ‘art-historical' objects which he has realised through a variety of media including paintings, sculpture, prints and, most recently, computer animations. He has had retrospectives at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2006) and Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2006), National Art Centre, Tokyo (2007) and has permanent large-scale installations at Regent's Place and The Laban Center, both in London. In 2006 he was appointed a Royal Academician. His work is held in numerous museum collections including the Tate Gallery, London, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and MoMA, New York