Martin Creed

About the artist

Martin Creed was born in Wakefield on 21 October 1968 and moved with his family to Glasgow at the age of three, when his father, a silversmith, took a teaching job there (Wikipedia). He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1986 to 1990 and lives and works in London (Hauser & Wirth). He works across installation, painting, film, theatre and music, and performs live with his band (Wikipedia).

Since 1987 he has numbered each of his works, and most titles describe the thing itself, as in Work No. 88, a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball (1995) (Wikipedia). He won the Turner Prize in 2001; his entry at Tate was Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, an empty room whose lights went on and off every five seconds (Wikipedia). Later commissions include Work No. 1059, which clad each of the 104 Scotsman Steps in Edinburgh in a different marble, and Work No. 1197, all the bells in the country rung for three minutes to mark the start of the 2012 Olympics (Wikipedia).

The phrase "Everything is going to be alright" runs through several works, each with its own number: a red neon in Times Square in 1999, Work No. 975 on the façade of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2009 and a 46-metre version for Christchurch Art Gallery in New Zealand (Wikipedia). The Joseph Clark Collection holds Work No. 3531, a 2022 giclée print of the phrase in an edition of 200 (Joseph Clark Collection). His work is in museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Colección Jumex in Mexico City (Wikipedia).

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Martin Creed
2. Hauser & Wirth: Martin Creed
3. Wikidata: Martin Creed (Q1385567)
4. Joseph Clark Collection