Martin Creed is a born multi-tasker. ‘I often think that if I’m trying to do a drawing or a painting or any kind of work, it’s like trying to narrow the world down to this one thing,’ says the British artist at a press preview for his exhibition at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. ‘It seems to me very artificial, because life is not like that. Life is all mixed up and all over the place.’ The same can be said of the sprawling survey—in the best possible way. Read more at http://www.wallpaper.com/art/martin-creed-hosts-impressive-survey-at-nyc-park-avenue-armory#uTEmKFWOsZBzgBMz.99​

A kind of extended happening, or maybe a series of short ones, has gently taken over the Park Avenue Armory, one of the architectural gems of New York. Numerous moving parts, animate and inanimate, are involved, and they are all the doing of the British maverick Martin Creed, the first artist to be given the run of the armory’s entire first floor, where he created an exhibition titled “The Back Door.” In the past, artists have mostly been limited, if that’s the word, to the armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. There, with greatly varying degrees of success, they have tended to orchestrate elaborately kitted-out spectacles, heavy with noise, lights or high-tech wizardry.​

The Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed is about to have a major New York moment. The Park Avenue Armory is devoting its many spaces, including the vast, dramatic drill hall, to the largest installation of Creed’s art yet to occur in the US. It runs from June 8 to August 7. Creed’s art is not bound by genre or medium – he uses paint, sculpture, film, dance, and music. Last week Creed issued a music video for his new song “Understanding,” which will be on the artist’s next album, Thoughts Lined Up (due in July).

“The Veterans Room at the Park Avenue Armory — completed in 1881 by the then-brand-new dream team of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White, Candace Wheeler and Samuel Colman — may be as close as any room in New York City comes to such beyond-words fantasia. Depending on which inch you’re looking at, it’s Islamic, Chinese, Greek, Celtic, Egyptian, Persian or an indefinable mélange of them all, on which no expense was spared. It’s never been a secret (the year it opened, this newspaper declared it “undoubtedly the most magnificent apartment of the kind in this country”), but for decades its glories have been concealed beneath bad repairs, inadequate lighting, brown paint and a patina of Gilded Age cigar smoke.”

“Few institutions have been as adept at pushing the cultural FOMO button that New Yorkers hate almost as much as slush puddles and bedbugs. ‪De Materie‬, seems poised to become one of the most talked-about events of the spring season.”

“Roderick Williams proved a natural and expressive communicator, with Susie Allan’s elegant playing an ideal foil for his eloquent delivery. He imbued each song with myriad colorful nuances, his rich, burnished baritone lovely throughout the evening.”