Steidlville

This publication presents a long overdue survey of the complete works of London-based artist Martin Creed. Reproducing every one of his more than 500 works, this extensive volume offers the first comprehensive survey of his artistic career. Creed’s sculptures, installations and drawings come from the objects, works, and sounds of everyday life. Constantly searching for the essential nature of things, he uses the simplest materials to create a world in which obsessions and fantasies radically alter reality and transform it into a catalogue of rigid rules and unexpected exceptions. His work is simultaneously spectacular and subtle, playful and severe, at times almost cruel in its stark dryness. Creed’s pieces are characterized by their economy of means and site specificity. This awareness of context and the role of the viewer leads to a variety of unexpected artistic propositions: a protrusion from the wall, a sheet of paper crumpled into a ball, a door opening and closing, the lights going on and off, or a soundtrack inside a moving lift.
Creed’s works do not have titles. Instead, they have inventory numbers and include fragments of text which have a pragmatic function as a basic, comprehensive description, transcription or instruction. “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.” Martin Creed