‘As the poet uses the words on the page and the painter the colour on the palette to extend
themselves to search for new forms and meanings, the sculptor uses materials as an
extension of himself.’
- Tony Cragg
Lisson Gallery announces an exhibition of new wood, bronze, stone and
stainless steel works by Tony Cragg previewing Tuesday, 16th May at 52-54 Bell
St.
From the outset of his career, Cragg has made no secret of his interest in the
physics of materials and the dialogue between the material, the artist and the
world at large. Like an alchemist or particle physicist, he combines process and
energy with the elementary constituents of matter to see how they ‘collide’.
“The sculptor engages the material with what he knows and comes away knowing
more.” Without exception, Cragg’s work reveals a rigorous intellectual process
and enquiry, resulting in a ‘grounded’ poetry, at once rational and powerfully
ethereal.
Read moreCragg’s seminal early work incorporated a wide range of objects and materials;
found industrial and domestic flotsam from which he assembled his work. In the
mid 1980s he began to look at the individual objects he had previously used as
parts in ‘larger constellations’ and decided to make objects ‘in which the form
makes itself apparent as an external skin’.
His work in recent years investigates the relationship between the aesthetic
world of geometric and biomorphic form, and the aesthetic world of the
organic, where natural materials take on synthetic forms and synthetic materials
at times look like natural objects. Other works deal with the notions of
metamorphosis, evolution, embryology and the metaphoric journey into
imperceptibility. In this exhibition Tony Cragg presents 8 new works cast in
bronze and stainless steel, as well as wood works and a stone work made from
diabas stone. Cragg’s method of stacking and layering is a simple, almost
elementary technique that belies the sophistication of the final outcome;
endlessly varied, often vast, always expressive and full of life. By centring his
architectural forms around variable axis, he creates both vertical and horizontal
works that infer an animated, gyrating, kinetic energy. From static, inert matter,
Cragg creates a visual language that “make(s) dumb material express human
thoughts and emotions.”
Born in Liverpool, Tony Cragg lives and works in Wuppertal, Germany. He
represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and was awarded the
prestigious Turner Prize in the following year. In 2002 he received the prestigious
Piepenbrock Award for Sculpture and was awarded the CBE for services to art
in 2001. He has exhibited extensively and has had major solo shows at the Tate
Gallery, London (1989), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1991), Concoran Gallery
of Art, Washington (1991), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
(1995), Lenbachhaus, Munich (1998), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1996),
Whitechapel Gallery, London (1997) the Tate Gallery, Liverpool (2001)
