Michael Craig-Martin

There is something fundamentally egalitarian about Your Paintings. It means all the nation’s paintings can be known to and accessible by the public that owns them. It will prove also an important tool for artists and cultural institutions alike. It allows artists to find out definitively the location of their works in public collections, greatly assisting them in the planning of exhibitions and publications. The comprehensive photographing of all works being undertaken by The Public Catalogue Foundation is already proving invaluable from a curatorial point of view. Your Paintings will help museums to have a better knowledge of their own collections and, as a result, make better use of them. I hope it will incite public interest in new works and encourage curators to rotate collections more frequently, breathing fresh life into the nation’s art archives, rescuing forgotten treasures from obscurity, and finding important new audiences for our public collections.