Lecture Room

Michael Craig-Martin curated this gallery by personally inviting Royal Academicians to show work. ‘Normally, the Royal Academicians are hidden in the Summer Exhibition among everyone else,’ he says. ‘I wanted to show their range and quality by focusing for the first time on RAs only, because there are lots of new ones and nobody quite realises that they have all arrived here.’

Installation view of the Lecture Room, Summer Exhibition 2011. Photo: John Bodkin/DawkinsColour

Craig-Martin is particularly determined to highlight the presence of recently elected RA women: Tacita Dean, Tracey Emin, Lisa Milroy, Cornelia Parker, Fiona Rae, Jenny Saville, Gillian Wearing and Alison Wilding. Their work – ranging from painting and sculpture to photography and neon – gives his room an extraordinary intensity. ‘I think there should be far more women RAs,’ says Craig-Martin. ‘It’s no longer acceptable that we have so few. I want to see a far broader representation of the art world among RAs. So I hope this room is a start to inaugurating change.’

Craig-Martin has also included male sculptors as outstanding as Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Michael Landy, Richard Long, David Mach, Michael Sandle, Richard Wilson and Bill Woodrow. Combined with work by some of the RA’s finest painters – Tony Bevan, Gary Hume, Allen Jones, Christopher Le Brun, Humphrey Ocean and Joe Tilson – the exhibits in this room have an enormously varied and stimulating impact. ‘There isn’t a dud work here,’ declares Craig-Martin. ‘I said to each of the artists: “I want something really special from you,” and they all became competitive when they realised who else would be included. That’s why they put their best feet forward.’ So too did Craig-Martin, whose haunting painting shows the word FATE interlinked ominously with a pink gate. ‘I always try to find unexpected correlations between words and images’, he explains, ‘and lock them together in a special way.’

• Royal Academy of Arts