Viewing Michael Craig-Martin at The Royal Academy of Arts

As the days start to draw in and the sky fades to grey, a welcome retreat can be found in a neon-bright retrospective of Sir Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy of Arts, a romp through the artist’s 60 year career, taking in sculptures, installations, paintings, drawings, prints and digital works that enliven the main galleries with Craig-Martin’s signature use of spectacular colour. It is the largest exhibition of the Irish artist’s work to be held in the UK to date.

Always blurring boundaries and adding a dose of irony to his art, Craig-Martin has fused various elements from graphic design, pop, minimalism and conceptual art since the 1960s. There is a room devoted to Craig-Martin’s early experiments with sculpture – such as his breakthrough 1973 piece, An Oak Tree: a glass of water poised on a glass shelf, with an explanation of why it is an oak tree. There are also plenty of examples of his bold, brightly-coloured acrylic paintings of desultory everyday objects and the trappings of modern life.

Craig-Martin, 83, is also revered as an educator – he began teaching in 1966, and in the 1980s taught a cohort of artists at Goldsmiths that included Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume. The exhibition culminates in a new site-specific work, an immersive digital video piece, Cosmos, signalling Craig-Martin’s desire to keep exploring new mediums. “I did think that the chance to do a retrospective show of this scale in the UK was gone, but here it is.” The artist told the Guardian in an interview. “It could hardly be later, but, in another way, it’s happening at exactly the right time.”