Michael Craig-Martin’s trademark site-specific line drawings hug the walls with such blank certainty that it's hard to imagine them as resulting from rough drafts or any kind of indecision. Preparatory drawings do exist, as this retrospective of the American’s works on paper from 1967-2002 confirms. But they’re not raw sketches: befitting a conceptualist practice that models rigorous intellectual control, they're primarily boutique versions of larger works.
Craig-Martin began as a sculptor, and the earliest drawings here, on isometric graph paper, are permutations of boxes in a Donald Judd vein: origins for objects. At some uncertain point, though, the drawing becomes indivisible from the final work. Indeed, part of the pleasure of the show is feeling his practice morph suavely from solidity to intangibility without knowing precisely where it’s happened.
There are flashes of dry humour: Craig-Martin’s working drawing for his landmark tumbler-on-shelf conceptual sculpture, ‘An Oak Tree’ (1974), for example, is merely a grid of half-full glasses. Primarily, though, we get methodical miniatures – described in slender lengths of glued-down tape – of his works from the late ’70s onwards, hyper-precise diagrammatic interpenetrations of everyday objects: globes, drills, cassette tapes, filing cabinets. As the artefacts pile up and hybridise, their individual significance dissolves. Each is just one more combinatorial prop in a practice that, finally, is coolly cavalier about the specificity of things even while seeming initially to hymn it.