Yet To Be Titled, 2023
Born 1949 | Lives and works in Wuppertal, Germany
A leading sculptor of his generation, Tony Cragg explores the relationship between
nature and the constructed world via a singular formal language. For more than five decades,
the British artist has created work that exceeds the categories of abstraction and
representation, bringing expressionistic energy to a broad range of materials and
experimenting with the interplay of positive and negative space. Cragg describes himself as a
“radical materialist,” interested in “the internal structures of material that result in their external
appearance.” He often makes forms that are biomorphic or that recall geological forms and
phenomena—sedimented minerals or stone eroded by the elements. He engages such forms
as a counter to the simple, repetitive geometries generated by industrial design. His work
opposes the expediency and anonymity of mass-production, ushering familiar forms or objects
into a context that might create new interpretation and emotional response. He works
iteratively, investigating a form’s varied permutations and gradually evolving his style as he
works on multiple objects simultaneously.
Cragg was born in Liverpool, UK, and has lived and worked in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977.
Comprising assemblages and stacks of found objects, his early work was inspired by the British
land artists, arte povera, and Joseph Beuys. Early on, he established his approach of classifying
and layering materials as well as working through a cumulative process. He was drawn to
materials that lacked romanticism and could be found in quotidian urban situations, but he also
sought to challenge the hard geometry and pure conceptualism of his peers. In the 1980s, he
arranged fragments of plastic into polychromatic figurative reliefs and embarked on one of his
largest bodies of work, Early Forms, which reconceives common vessels used by humans since
prehistoric times. He is perhaps best known for his Rational Beings series, which features
stalagmite-like totems that explore the relationship between logical and emotional modes of
experiencing the world. “The human figure is an organic form, but has many geometries: our
organs, bone structure, cells and molecules,” he explains. “I like to vary this structure till it has
an emotional effect on me.”
