Martin Creed
| Martin Creed | |
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| Born | 1968 Wakefield, England |
| Education | Slade School of Art at University College London |
| Awards | Turner Prize (2001) |
| Website | http://www.martincreedmusic.com/ |
Martin Creed (born 1968) is a British artist and musician. He won the Turner Prize in 2001 for Work No. 227: The lights going on and off. Creed lives and works in London.
Martin Creed was born in Wakefield, England. He moved with his family to Glasgow at age 3 when his silversmith father got a job teaching there. He grew up revering art and music. His parents were Quakers, and he was taken often to Quaker meetings. He attended Lenzie Academy, and studied art at the Slade School of Art at University College London from 1986 to 1990.
Creed's work often makes use of whatever medium seems suitable. Since 1987, he has numbered each of his works, and most of his titles are descriptive, for example Work No. 79: some Blu-tack kneaded, rolled into a ball and depressed against a wall (1993) and Work No. 88, a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball (1994). Creed's work Work No. 200: Half the air in a given space (1998) is a room which has half of its cubic space filled with balloons.
Creed's submission for the 2001 Turner Prize show at the Tate Gallery was Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, which won that year's prize. The work was an empty room in which the lights switched on and off at 5-second intervals. As so often with the Turner Prize, this created a great deal of press attention, most of it questioning whether something as minimalist as this could be considered art at all.
His work has often excited controversy: a visitor threw eggs at the walls of Creed's empty room as a protest against the prize, declaring that Creed's presentations were not real art and that "painting is in danger of becoming an extinct skill in this country". In recent years Creed has been exhibiting paintings in nearly every exhibition he has done.
Work No. 1197 "All the bells in the country rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes" was commissioned to herald the start of the 2012 Summer Olympics.
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