Michael Craig-Martin review – sorry, but these lamps and filing cabinets just aren’t that interesting

Royal Academy, London
His early conceptual work inspired the likes of Damien Hirst, but the RA has inexplicably focused on his cool and clinical representations of the ordinary stuff of modern life

It’s an achievement to stretch a single idea as thinly as this retrospective of Michael Craig-Martin does. You start by laughing with him, in his clever classics of 1970s conceptual art. You end by laughing at him and the Royal Academy for thinking that his later, gapingly empty paintings and videos can really fill up the main galleries at Burlington House with their re-workings of the same exhausted theme.

That theme is objects. Craig-Martin has spent decades drawing and painting things, the more modern and ordinary the better: safety pins, forks, iPhones, wheelie suitcases. He depicts them with a designer’s precise perspective in a cool, clinical style with clear lines and neon-bright colours.

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