Martin Creed

Martin Creed (born 21 October 1968) is a British artist, composer and performer.

He attended Lenzie Academy, and studied art at the Slade School of Art at University College London from 1986 to 1990.

Since 1987 he has numbered each of his works, and most of his titles are descriptive: for example Work No. 79: some Blu-tack kneaded, rolled into a ball and depressed against a wall (1993) and Work No. 88, a sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball (1995).

Creed's work Work No. 200: Half the air in a given space (1998) is a room which has half of its cubic space filled with balloons.

Previous to Work No. 975, a red neon text appeared in New York's Times Square (Work No.225 1999, commissioned by Public Art Fund), a thirty-metre-long version was installed in Detroit (Work No.790 2007), and another text in white neon ran the 23 metre length of the Rennie Museum's façade in Vancouver's Chinatown (Work No.851 2008).

Most recently, a 46-metre multicoloured version was commissioned for Christchurch Art Gallery, in the advent of its reopening after almost five years of earthquake-related closure.

Since then he has lived in London, apart from a period (2000—2004) living in Alicudi, an island off Sicily in the South of Italy.

He currently lives and works back in London.

He is a vegan.

Films, installations, paintings, theatre and live-action sculptures are all characteristic of his work.

Making use of whatever medium seems suitable.

He won the Turner Prize in 2001 for exhibitions during the preceding year, with the jury praising his audacity for exhibiting a single installation, Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, in the Turner Prize show.

Creed lives and works in London.

Martin Creed was born in Wakefield, England.

He moved with his family to Glasgow at age 3 when his silversmith father got a job teaching there.

He grew up revering art and music.

His parents were Quakers, and he was taken often to Quaker meetings.

Creed won the 2001 Turner Prize for two exhibitions, Martin Creed Works and Art Now: Martin Creed shown across England during the preceding year.

His submission for the Turner Prize show at the Tate Gallery was Work No. 227: The lights going on and off.

The work was an empty room in which the lights switched on and off at 5-second intervals.

As so often with the Turner Prize, this created a great deal of press attention, most of it questioning whether something as minimalist as this could be considered art at all.

Nevertheless, the jury praised this work, saying they "admired the audacity in presenting a single work in the exhibition and noted its strength, rigour, wit and sensitivity to the site".

His work has often excited controversy: a visitor threw eggs at the walls of Creed's empty room as a protest against the prize, declaring that Creed's presentations were not real art and that "painting is in danger of becoming an extinct skill in this country".

In recent years Creed has been exhibiting paintings in nearly every exhibition he has done.

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.

In 2009, he wrote and choreographed Work No. 1020: Ballet, a live performance of Creed's music, ballet, words and film, originally produced by Sadler's Wells, London and performed in the Lilian Baylis Studio.

Creed's Work No. 975 EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT, was installed on the facade of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in November 2009.

Although Work No. 975 is a unique sculpture, the phrase has been used on several related works, each assigned its own work number.

In 2010, Work No. 1020: Ballet was performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and at The Kitchen, New York, in December 2013.

Work No. 1020 was also performed in 2014 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in connection with Creed's retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London.

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's Work No. 1059 was subsequently installed, cladding each of the 104 steps and landings in a different type of marble.

Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones called it "a generous, modest masterpiece of contemporary public art".

In 2012 Creed was the first artist to participate in the long-term programme of artist-conceived restaurants at Sketch, London.

Together with a series of paintings and wall drawings, Creed specifically created Work No. 1343 where every single piece of cutlery, glass, chair and table was different and brought together a mix of the mass-produced and hand-crafted, from classic antiques to contemporary design from all around the world.

Work No. 1347, still on display at the restaurant, consists of 96 different types of marble, in a herringbone formation across the floor.

He designed an artpiece for Victoria Beckham's store on Dover Street in Mayfair, London in 2015.

Many of his works are on free public view, like the Scotsman Steps in Edinburgh, DON'T WORRY at St Peter's Church, Cologne, The singing lifts at The Royal Festival Hall, London, and also at the Centro Botin in Santander, and the huge spinning sign MOTHERS on a roof in Fort Worth, Texas.

Many works too are in Museum collections worldwide, from the floor work at Colleccion Jumex in Mexico City (permanently installed) to The lights going on and off at the Museum of Modern Art New York.

Creed continues to exhibit work internationally and regularly gives talks and plays live with his band.