Michael Craig-Martin: ‘It’s very difficult in art to be dishonest’

World View distils conversations with leading artists from around the globe, to explore how they see the world through the prism of their life and art.

Michael Craig-Martin is among the leading artists of his generation, with a distinctive visual language of prints, multiples, paintings, and sculptures of common objects that are defined by his’s sharp and almost uncanny engagement with colour. An erudite and ever-interested interlocutor, Craig-Martin is something of a perpetual student and teacher in one: always ready to engage in meaningful discussions not only around his practice—for which he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his contributions to art in 2016—but around art in general, and the role it plays in a world shared in common.

Of course, the artist’s legacy as a teacher was cemented early on, given his key role in mentoring the cohort of students at London’s Goldsmiths College of Art in the 1980s that would come to be known as the Young British Artists (YBAs). But as the artist once said, the only difference between a teacher and student is age: a point that reflects the artist’s ongoing interaction and engagement with the contemporary. That perspective was no doubt influenced by the artist’s interest in luminaries like John Cage and R. Buckminster Fuller: “people,” he once noted, “who think into the future.”

In this interview, which took place ahead of STPI’s Politics of Print Symposium held in January 2026, Craig-Martin once again demonstrated his generosity of spirit and thought, which has only strengthened with time. The discussion revolved around a quote by Craig-Martin that was used to frame part of the symposium: “One of the most important creative realisations I have made in my life is that everything in the world is potentially available to use as art; that you can make art out of anything; that it does not matter what the thing is, it is rather a question of how transformation occurs.” It is a perspective that has defined Craig-Martin’s remarkable life and work.

How would you define your relationship with printmaking?

There were two things that first struck me about printmaking when I began in the early ’90s. One was the possibility of making something in multiple forms that made it accessible to a vastly greater number of people than one would normally get if one made a painting or a sculpture or created a specific object. The whole idea that the audience can be as big as possible is very important to me. It’s important to me in my processes, in the subject matter, and my use of colour—everything I’m thinking of is how to work in a way that is both sophisticated and simple.

The other thing that struck me about printmaking, which I find very interesting about it, is that it involves working with somebody else. There’s a team effort involved in printmaking. It’s not rarefied. It’s hands on. It’s cooperative, collaborative. When I’m working with printers, I’m listening to their voice as much as they’re listening to mine.  They can tell me something out of their knowledge, which is useful to me, and between us, we can come up with something. It seems to me that these are aspects that have enormous potential and political implications, given the range of accessibility that defines printmaking.

Absolutely. In that sense, what have been some of the most enriching experiences, or the most surprising experiences, in terms of collaborating through the process of printing?

Well, most of the prints that I’ve done have been screenprints. And in a way, screenprinting is different than etching or lithography, the traditional forms of printmaking. This is because very often the artist is literally working on a stone with the printer. There’s a distance when you're dealing with screen printers. I don’t actually do the screenprinting myself, so really the collaboration has to do with colour.

For me, this has been absolutely central. I will say to the printer that I’m working with: “This is the kind of colour that I'm trying to achieve, and I’m indicating that to you in what I give you as a sample of what to do. But if, through your process, you find a better red than the one that I’m looking for, then that’s the one we're going to use.”

There’s a lot of trust here, right? You’re entrusting your work to a printmaker.

I like working with the same people repeatedly because they eventually know what I want. There’s a certain kind of vividness that I want in the colour. Forms of colour, of making paint, of ink, of dye: every colour is different. You can sometimes achieve an amazing blue in one kind of material, get a better blue or less good one with a different material. It depends, because across different processes, the materiality gives you a different palette. There’s no sense in saying: “This is exactly what I want.” Sometimes you can achieve what colour you want, of course, but you might also achieve something better. For that, you need the knowledge of the person who deals with this.

It’s nice because I suppose it alleviates some of the anxiety you may have? Someone to give feedback to, and get feedback from?

Absolutely. Working alone in a studio is not exactly the same kind of process as working with somebody else whom you're basically depending on to actually produce a work. But what I do is collaborate with people who will show the work to me, we critique it together about how to improve it, and it goes back, they do it again, critique it, and the process repeats. We're trying to focus on what would be the proper, best form.

How does that expand on this idea of accessibility? You’re known to work with objects, or representations of objects, that are immediately recognisable—things you can find at home, in the supermarket. How does that process feed into this idea of resisting the rarefied object?

My idea from the very beginning was that the objects that we all know, that we all use, constitute an international language. They ride above political considerations, religious considerations and philosophical considerations. We all know what a shoe is. We all know what a table is. The world has become so unified in knowledge, experience and objects. There are only a few rare places on Earth where people don’t share an understanding of the basic objects that we take for granted. So I’ve tried to use that in my practice: this amazing unifying character about the universality of the modern world.

I'm not interested in consumerism. I’m not interested in consumers in terms of monetary value. I’m not interested in taste. I am interested in the things that we share. On the one hand, they’re very general. If I do a drawing of a trainer, it means something different to different people: it's both general and also very personal. It’s like, your phone. Everybody today has a phone. They’re all made by the same couple of manufacturers. They’re all the same, and in that sense, they’re not interesting objects. Yet my phone is my phone, and your phone is your phone, and we don’t want to get them confused, because it’s deeply personal.

Listening to you, I was thinking whether we could look at a bottle as a print, for example, bearing in mind, of course, the edition? Especially when we think about AI and 3D printing today, and the legacies of mechanical reproduction.

Mechanical reproduction is how we have all these things in the world. Basically I draw mass produced objects. I don’t draw unique objects designed by special people who make beautiful things. I’m not interested in things that are eccentric. I’m not interested in things that are old either. Instead, I like things that are familiar, that everybody recognises. Because I’m trying to touch people with these drawings, to surprise them, there’s something about taking an object and turning it into an image. Making it into art dignifies that object. It gives it status that it might not have. So I'm very happy to make a drawing of a free paper cup they give you when you buy a coffee. It has no value.

So if one were to look at, let’s say, a print that you’ve made of a cup, would you think that this would change how someone reacts or responds to a cup that they see?

I would hope that first of all, they would recognise the cup instantly without even thinking about the image. There is no actual cup. It’s an image of a cup. And yet we have that experience that it’s here, and that’s that: there’s a resonance from that recognition. I draw in a very factual way. I’m very precise and accurate. I never try to distort anything. But when it comes to the colour, I take every liberty possible and hopefully that simple thing of changing the colour reframes how one sees that object.

I love the idea of reframing. With that in mind, could you elaborate on what you meant when you said “You can make art out of anything, it’s rather a question of how transformation occurs”? Perhaps you can also offer some insight about this idea of transformation?

Art really deals with the way an individual responds to the world. We share the world but our experience of it is individual. So the question is not about what is appropriate as a subject, material, or process for art. Art is perfectly able to absorb all those considerations within its boundaries. Rather, the question is about how you choose to manifest that transformation of the world into art. That’s an individual process. Again, it’s incredibly open ended, but it’s in that choice that one person’s vision is differentiated from another. Our main source is the world that we share, and we transform it by what we do. We give a different view.

The nice thing about art is, however you do it, you will always find that there are people who say: “That's how I think too. That's familiar to me.” Because that’s what recognition is, where I think we have all had the experience of seeing a work of art and being deeply touched by it. That emotional response has to do with the fact that we recognise what we see. It’s as though we've already known it. It’s just that somebody else has put it into a language, in a way that we have not been able to do.

So beautifully said. With that in mind, I have a final question, if I may. What have you learned about politics through your practice?

It depends on what you mean by politics. I’m not an artist who is overtly political in the way that I work, but I just think at a deeper level, everything about art is political because it has to do with values, meaning, and ethics. These things are formed, in a sense, by the most important thing: as the things that one does without being able to help it. We are who we are, and art is amazingly honest. It’s very difficult in art to be dishonest. It’s a cheat if you can be dishonest, because art has a tendency to tell the truth.

Whether it likes it or not, whether it wants to tell the truth or not, or whether you like it or not, art always tells the truth?

If you are behaving towards art in an honourable way, it will show that. And if it's a dishonourable way, the art will show that too. If you’re happy, it will show that. If you're depressed, it will show that. It always will return the truth. That’s an amazing thing about art. It’s very hard to cheat it because it always comes back to where the essence of things lie.

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Michael Craig-Martin's first solo exhibition in Taiwan, The Language of the Everyday will take place at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA), and will run from 3 October 2026 to 7 March 2027. His prints will also be included in an upcoming exhibition exploring printmaking at Lakeside Arts, Nottingham, United Kingdom, opening January 2027.