The artist Michael Craig-Martin has made sure that the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London will go down as one of, if not the, most colourful in the show's long and illustrious history. The co-ordinator of the 247th exhibition, which opens to the public at the weekend (8 June-16 August), Craig-Martin has chosen wall colours that start proceedings with a visual bang. The largest room is painted hot pink, the central hall turquoise and a third gallery a fetching blue (other rooms are a traditional white). He has also invited Jim Lambie and Liam Gillick to add their own splashes of colour. Lambie has transformed the grand staircase with a signature multicoloured vinly tape work while Gillick has been busy aloft creating a ceiling piece out of Plexiglass. Craig-Martin says that installing the open-submission show is a daunting task. A bit of colour-coding seems to have helped, after all, he and his esteemed fellow hangers don't know exactly what is on the 1,200-strong exhibition list until the day the grand hang begins. Handily Matthew Darbyshire has submitted Captcha No.11 (Doryphoros), a copy of the ancient Greek sculpture of a spear-carrying warrior in polychrome polycarbonate, which occupies pride of place at the start of the show.
