Tony Cragg

born in Liverpool, UK, in 1949 - lives and works in Wuppertal, Germany

photograph Philipp Wente

Tony Cragg is one of the most important representatives of British artists born in the early 50s. This generation has initiated a Renaissance in sculpture based on objects. New materials, until now not used in art, came into use.
Similarly to Richard Deacon and Bill Woodrow, Tony Cragg began his studies in art school in the late 60s and early 70s, in the period when minimalism, conceptualism and arte povera were reigning as the most popular movements. The public became interested in Richard Long’s stone objects, brick works by Carl Andre, Mario Merz’s needles, Bruce Neuman or Gilbert and George.

Cragg’s first works produced in his RCA studio consisted of a stool and little wood pieces while the contents of his first exhibtions were pieces of plastic combined to reproduce the colour spectrum in the form a crescent shape. They appeared to be an attempt to adapt elements of the outer world for art’s sake. The artist quickly realised that the method of heroic gestures for their own sake or to demonstrate geometric processes is futile as it renders the work meaningless.

Early works of the 1970s were mostly made with found objects through which Cragg questioned and tested possibilities. Later pieces demonstrated a shift of interest to surface quality and how that could be manipulated, and a play with unlikely juxtapositions of materials. Results vary from the exquisite to the grotesque, from the refined to the crude, in bronze, steel, plastic, rubber, glass, wood, plaster and more.The artist’s use of such diverse materials and ready-mades is an evidence of his search for a new metaphor in sculpture.

After having moved to the Rhineland in 1977, Cragg became aware of a European cultural heritage and not only strove to be shown on the continent but first of all to refer to economic development, climate and intellectual genealogy.

Many of the people Cragg admits to be influenced by are scientists and philosophers like Isaac Newton and Alain Prochiantz. Being inspired by their works in the 80s he exhibits small wooden forms resembling Norwegian fjord area houses, steel constructions of the Albert Dock in his home-town Liverpool and gigantic versions of laboratory equipment.

An artist of great international acclaim and immense energy, Cragg has developed more possibilities in the making of sculpture than any other sculptor since Moore discovered the ‘hole’ as positive space. He has employed more materials than most, and tested them to their limits through a wide variety of means, so that he seems to be one hundred sculptors at any one time. Cragg’s contribution to the debate on contemporary sculpture practice is considerable.