Winner of the prestigious Turner Prize in 2001, Martin Creed was born in 1968 in Wakefield, England. The artist has exhibited in some of the most important institutions and museums in the world including Tate Modern, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco. His work has been included in many collective exhibitions and biennials including ‘State of Play’ at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, the Sidney Biennial, Sidney and his work is also included in the 4th Berlin Biennale in Berlin.

www.martincreed.com

SELECTED WRITINGS
MARTIN CREED

Maybe working is trying, and work – the result of work – is everything that one tries to do. Trying… looking for excitement, or trying to handle it and use it to get out of the paté. Trying to do things; talking. Or maybe testing is a good way of putting it: testing things out. Testing things put by putting things about, all the time trying, hoping to be excited, wanting. Wanting is what makes me work: excitement, desire for something.

Work is a fight against loneliness, against low esteem, against depression, and against staying in bed. Sometimes my self esteem is so low that I cannot reach it even when I’m feeling down. I want to be on my own, but I don’t want to be alone.

My work is 50% about what I make and 50% about what other people make of it.

I don't know what I want to say, but, to try to say something, I think I want to try to think. I want to try to see what I think. I think trying is a big part of it, I think thinking is a big part of it, and I think wanting is a big part of it, but saying it is difficult, and I find saying trying and nearly always wanting. I want what I want to say to go without saying.

I want all my works to be equal, big or small, a piece of music, a sculpture, an installation, or a painting. I want them to be treated the same – giving them all a number was one way of trying to do that.

I wouldn’t want to pretend that I know what the work means. When I talk I am only saying what I think about something. I’m not saying what anyone else might think.

I started numbering my works because I wasn't happy with titles made of words. They meant too much and added too much extra, and I wanted a way of treating everything the same, big or small, whatever it was made of, whatever it was. Using numbers - just like catalogue numbers - seemed a good way of doing this. All numbers are equal. When I started numbering my works I went back and gave numbers to old ones. I got quite self-conscious about it - about which numbers I gave to which works - and found that I didn't want to have a 'Work No. 1'. It was too much. I couldn't live with it. WORK NO. 1, MY FIRST WORK! NO WAY! The point of the numbering was to try to give all works the same value - to treat everything the same - but the number one just was not the same. Not all numbers are equal. And so I tried to make a kind of fade-in. I started with 3, put 5 next, and went on up from there.

SELECTED WRITINGS

Martin Creed delights in the mechanics of the everyday. His work is a majestic and sentimental statement of the obvious, and through it one re-encounters the world in all its banal glory.
Dale McFarland (in Frieze)

Martin Creed’s practice can be distilled down to a series of exercises in awareness. As such, the more economically this intention can be brought about, the more satisfying it becomes. If it can be achieved by doing nothing at all, it attains some kind of perfection.
Godfrey Worsdale (Southampton City Art Gallery Catalogue)

Martin Creed’s works are the opposite of autonomous works of art. The common material and the tactile quality reveal an attempt to incorporate everyday life into art, blurring the distinction between both. Creed’s works only exist if they’re experienced, responded to, or dealt with.
Pablo Lafuente (in Flash Art)

“Nothing” is an important word in the vocabulary of Martin Creed. As it does not have the power to separate things, it allows him to deal with “everything”. The artist uses it in order to deconstruct the language. It allows things to be reached in a physical, rather than abstract sense, in their state of continuity with other things.
Pawel Polit (Ujadowski Castle Catalogue)

Martin Creed’s provocative and witty works challenge our preconceptions and acceptance of the world around us. He does this not by adding anything to these familiar objects, texts and situations, but simply re-contextualising them as art and therefore asking us to consider them as we might not otherwise. Creed is simply offering us compelling and intriguing objects, interventions and statements, the rest is up to us.
Katherine Stout (Centre for Contemporary Art Warsaw Catalogue)

For an artist who repeatedly states that his work is about “nothing in particular”, Martin Creed manages to say quite a lot. Much of his work provides a running commentary on the formal and administrative frameworks of the space in which he is exhibiting. And while Creed’s interventions do indeed look like almost nothing, the effects they have on their respective environments are always alarmingly powerful.
Alex Coles (in Art in America)

Martin Creed’s strength lies in his willingness to foist meaning outside the work so that the viewer and context make it art. Whatever its ironies, they embrace us. His work is autonomous yet passive, flirting with its capacities for meaning but unwilling a full commit.
Lisa Gabrielle Mark (in C: International Contemporary Art)