1999 was an important year for Michael Craig-Martin, in which he was commissioned to produce a large-scale wall painting for the exhibition Modern Starts: Things at MoMA New York and was given his second solo gallery show in the United States (his first in New York), at Peter Blum Gallery.

The present work is one of six paintings Craig-Martin showcased in the Peter Blum Gallery exhibition, Common History. Each of the works that featured were titled Common History and also individually titled: Park; Dance; None of the Above; Conference; Vanitas and Totem.

In Common History: Park, Craig-Martin unites a number of immediately recognisable motifs - the urinal from Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Fountain, 1971, the pipe from René Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images, 1929 and the cans from Jasper Johns’ bronze sculpture Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), 1964 - paying homage to some of the greatest conceptual works in modern art history. Next to these, he paints a water glass, a reference to his own seminal work An Oak Tree, 1973 (comprising a glass of water on glass shelf and accompanying text, currently on long term loan to the Tate Gallery). By including his work, Craig-Martin not only enters into the historical narrative within the composition, but he also effectively elevates his work to the same level as these iconic masterpieces, suggesting that they share common ground and common history.

Characteristic of Craig-Martin’s highly stylised manner, in this painting the pared-back forms are rendered in bold, black outline and filled with contrasting, vivid, block colours. The colour combinations, which differ in each of the six canvasses from the 1999 exhibition, have no correlation to the objects themselves, but are used artificially, both for emotional impact and for formal reasons - to pick out certain materials within the object, or to differentiate between interior and exterior forms. Unlike in other works, such as Vanitas, Totem and Conference, where motifs are overlapped, here each object is presented as an isolated entity floating within an ambiguous pictorial space. Every form is depicted whole, except the urinal whose right side is cropped to the extreme right edge of the canvas, reinforcing our sense of the painting as a constructed image.

Banal, everyday objects have been a recurring motif in Craig-Martin’s work since the late 1970s. That the motifs seen here adhere to this category and are also simultaneously loaded with art historical connotations, would have appealed greatly to the artist, who was fascinated by the expressive potential of objects and their capacity to constitute a universal visual language.