Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg stands as one of the world's leading sculptors, consistently pushing boundaries to explore new connections between humanity and the material realm

Biography of Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg was born in 1949 in Liverpool, UK. After completing high school, he initially pursued a career as a laboratory technician for the British Rubber Producers Research Association. Subsequently, he enrolled in art studies at Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology, Cheltenham, where he remained from 1968 to 1970.

In 1973, he graduated from the Wimbledon School of Art with a BA. In that same year, he continued his academic journey by pursuing sculpture studies at the Royal College of Art in London, where he obtained his MA degree in 1977.

In 1977, Tony Cragg moved to Wuppertal in Germany, where he has lived and worked since. After moving, he held numerous solo exhibitions, including those at Lisson Gallery in London (1979), Lützowstraße Situation in Berlin (1979), and Künstlerhaus Weidenallee in Hamburg (1979).

In 1981, he produced "Britain Seen from the North," regarded as a pivotal early piece, comprised of multi-colored fragments of assorted materials arranged in relief on the wall.

In 1988, Cragg was honored with the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery in London and represented Britain at the 42nd Venice Biennale (1988). He held the position of Professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, from 1999 to 2009, and has been serving as a Professor at Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, Germany, since 2009.

Cragg's recent solo exhibitions include "Alternate Reality" at Pánstwowa Galeria Sztuki in Sopot (2023), "Material in Mind" at Kistefos Museum in Jevnaker (2023), "Riot" at Lisson Gallery in New York (2023), and many more.

Tony Cragg's Art Style

In his early career, Tony Cragg focused on site-specific installations utilizing found objects and discarded materials. His initial stacked works demonstrate a taxonomic interpretation of the world, with Cragg describing manmade objects as "fossilized keys to a past time which is our present." Similarly, his arrangements of objects on floors and walls from the 1980s onwards blur the distinction between manmade and natural landscapes.

During the early 1980s, Cragg shifted his focus from installation art towards a detailed examination of the individual objects comprising his larger compositions. This marked the inception of his exploration and experimentation with various permanent materials, including wood, plaster, stone, fiberglass, Kevlar, stainless steel, cast iron, and bronze, delving into their properties and potentialities.

Throughout the 1990s, Cragg continued to develop two major bodies of work that have remained central to his artistic output to this day: the "Early Forms" and the "Rational Beings". The "Early Forms" delve into the potential of reshaping familiar objects, such as containers, into novel and unfamiliar forms, thereby eliciting fresh emotional responses, relationships, and meanings.

On the other hand, "Rational Beings" explore the correlation between two seemingly disparate aesthetic interpretations of the world: the rational, mathematically driven formal constructions that underpin the most intricate organic forms we emotionally respond to. The human figure serves as a prime example of an entity that appears organically inclined, evoking emotional responses, despite being fundamentally a highly intricate geometric composition comprising molecules, cells, organs, and processes.