At 83, you could forgive Michael Craig-Martin for grumbling that it’s about time he was given a career-spanning retrospective. But you get the sense from this inescapably joyful and beautifully hung exhibition at the Royal Academy, that he’s probably just warmly pleased, by everything.
The Irish-born artist is now almost certainly best known for being the much-loved tutor to the YBAs. The fame of his protegées has eclipsed his by far, despite him making headlines himself with the apogee of his own early conceptual explorations, An Oak Tree (1973) – a glass of water on a shelf, accompanied by a text explaining that the artist had transformed the object into an oak tree (on display here in a fascinating first room).
