“I don’t think it’s necessary to be original. It’s necessary to be honest.”
Martin Creed: What’s the point of it? is the first major retrospective of Creed’s ingenious and often highly provocative work. Since the beginning of his career, when he made small objects that could be placed anywhere, Creed has made work that questions the very nature of art and challenges taboos. His work takes on a multitude of forms—from sculpture, paintings, neons, films and installations, to music and performance—appearing both in the art gallery and in broader public circulation. At once rigorous and humorous, his art continually surprises, disrupts and overturns our expectations. It reflects on the unease we face in making choices, the comfort we find in repetition, the desire to control, and the inevitable losses of control that shape existence.
Martin Creed Work No. 88 1995 A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball.
“Real art doesn’t have a message, doesn’t necessarily say anything. It is an arrangement of shapes, a pattern of words. If you want an antidote to this idea of art, watch Bob Dylan manically arranging and rearranging words on a shop sign he and the band spotted one day. That is art.”
