Background
Martin Creed was born on October 21, 1968 in Wakefield, United Kingdom. Martin moved with his family to Glasgow at the age of three when his father got a teaching job there.
Martin Creed was born on October 21, 1968 in Wakefield, United Kingdom. Martin moved with his family to Glasgow at the age of three when his father got a teaching job there.
Martin attended Lenzie Academy, and studied art at the Slade School of Art at University College London from 1986 to 1990.
After art school he lived and worked in London until 2001, when he moved to Alicudi, Italy. Since 1987 he has numbered each of his works, and most of his titles are descriptive. Creed's work "Work No. 200: Half the air in a given space", created in 1998, is a room which has half of its cubic space filled with balloons.
Creed's first band, Owada, was formed in 1994 with Adam McEwen and Keiko Owada. In 1997, they released their first CD, "Nothing", on David Cunningham's Piano label. Sound has also featured in his gallery-based work, with pieces using doorbells, drum machines and metronomes. Since 1999 he has not used the band name "Owada." In 2000, Martin published a recording of his songs titled "I Can't Move" under his own name with the arts publisher Art Metropole, in Toronto.
In 2011 Creed was commissioned by Fruitmarket Gallery to make a work as part of the restoration of the historic Scotsman Steps in Edinburgh. Creed started his own label, Telephone Records, and released the single "Thinking/ Not Thinking" in early 2011, following it up with the single "Where You Go" in 2012. His 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. A new body of audiovisual work was released in late November 2015 in response to the Syrian refugee crisis. The double A-side single “Let Them In / Border Control” was made available via Telephone Records as free downloads on Soundcloud. Both songs are accompanied by videos which Creed produced himself. In July 2016, Martin Creed released a new album entitled "Thoughts Lined Up." The album includes the singles "Understanding" and "Princess Taxi Girl" for which accompanying videos have been released.
Creed continues to exhibit work internationally and regularly gives talks and plays live with his band. In 2017 he had an exposition in Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands titled "Say Cheese." In this exhibition he showed a wall with 1000 broccoli prints in various colors, he filled a room with blue balloons for walking through. In another room he showed many metronomes were ticking at different speeds. He currently lives and works in London and Alicudi.
Work No. 384 (A sheet of paper folded up and unfolded)
Work No. 557
Work No. 227 (The lights going on and off)
Work No. 373
Work No. 223 (Three metronomes beating time, one quickly, one slowly, and one neither quickly or slowly)
Work No. 628
Work No. 1233
Work No. 508 (Black painting)
Work No. 3 (Yellow Painting)
Work No. 336 (Feelings)
Work No. 79 (Some Blu-Tack kneaded, rolled into a ball, and depressed against a wall)
Work No. 275 (Small Things)
Work No. 122 (Drum machine)
Work No. 264 (Two protrusions from a wall)
Work No. 205 (Everything Is Going to be Alright)
Work No. 436
Work No. 850 (Runners)
Work No. 330
Work No. 472
Martin rejects the term “conceptual” and calls himself an “expressionist”, referring to his notion that all art stems from feeling. His works run the gamut from deadpan, minimalist interventions to rapidly rendered, expressionistic portraits. He approaches art making with humor, anxiety, and experimentation, and with the sensibility of a musician and composer, underpinning everything he does with his open ambiguity about what art is.
Quotations: “Anything is art that is used as art by people.”
Martin is a vegan.