Drawing by Michael Craig-Martin (Standard Edition)

Michael Craig-Martin began making line drawings of ordinary objects, one at a time, in 1978, and has continued to add to this vocabulary of images to the present day.  All are of man-made objects, mostly mass-produced, immediately familiar in the contemporary world. They have been at the core of most of his work since 1978.

This book contains a great proportion of those drawings, 300 in all, presented over 600 pages. Unlike most drawings they do not exist as unique images on paper.

As the artist explains:

For these drawings there are no “originals” in the usual sense. In the early days I drew each object in pencil on paper and traced it in fine tape on acetate. I then destroyed the pencil drawings. Since the mid-’90s I have drawn directly on a computer using the mouse as pencil. No hard copy exists unless I print or paint one. In the beginning I intended my drawings to look as styleless as possible, without any hint of my personal intervention, but after making hundreds over the years it became clear that they did have a style, which is now recognisable as my style.

In a sense this can be seen not as a book of reproductions, but of originals.