TONY CRAGG 16.11 - 16.12.2017 - Artcity21

Tony Cragg, Willow, 2016, bronze, 85 x 80 x 80 cm

TONY CRAGG

SCULPTURES

Galleri Andersson/Sandström is delighted to present a solo exhibition of new sculptures by Tony Cragg, which will be the seventh exhibition by the artist, at the gallery.

Cragg is one of the world’s most distinguished sculptors and he has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Barnett Newman Foundation Award in 2016, the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award in 2007, he represented Britain in the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988 and was the winner of the Turner Prize the same year. He was also the first contemporary artist who exhibited under the pyramid at the Louvre museum in Paris 2011. In 2016 he was made Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II for his service to the visual arts and Anglo-German relations.

Cragg's boundless curiosity and desire to observe the dynamics between ourselves and the material world has resulted in a unique form of expression with great inner means. The sculptures form physical approaches for viewing the world from the outside, methods of searching for new forms and to formulate questions on the world we exist in and observations on our reality. Formerly untried material present new visual experiences and thus new intellectual and emotional understandings. At the beginning of his career he created works of found items such as industrial waste and plastic containers, since then he has continued to work in stone, clay, bronze, glass, wood and various kinds of synthetic materials.

The exhibition presents works that have been made over the last two years, and all of which are clear examples of his diversity. In the work Industrial Nature, it is as if Cragg destroyed a form and then re-assembled its pieces to create tension within its broken entirety.

Cragg has said: “From my point of view, I believe that material is everything. We consists of material and the room we are in consists of material, and so I can’t think of any reality that isn’t material… I think that sculpture is a kind of sensitising activity and that it has a role in being a catalyst that may lead to more sensitive thinking”.

Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool, UK in 1949 and has lived and worked in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977. During the past few years, there have been several important solo exhibitions of Tony Cragg’s work all over the world: MUDAM Luxemburg (2017); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017); Museo Nacional Havana, Cuba (2017); Von der Heydt, Wuppertal, Germany (2016); The State Hermitage Museum, Russia (2016), Benaki Museums, Athens, Greece (2015); Madison Square Park, New York, (2014), Lembruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany (2013); CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China (2012); The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, (2011) and Musée du Louvre, Paris (2011). This fall his work are presented at the Teheran Museum of Contemporary Art travelling thereafter travelling to Isfahan Museum of Art and the Sanati Contemporary Arts Museum, Kerman. A forthcoming exhibition at Istanbul Modern opens in December and in May 2018 his works will be featured in the outdoor Park Avenue Malls in New York.

Tony Cragg, Spring, 2016, bronze, 100 x 90 x 26 cm

In the beginning of 2000s Tony Cragg began looking for a permanent site for presenting sculpture outdoors and discovered the abandoned Waldfrieden property, which he bought in 2006. The same year he began redesigning the park grounds and the buildings that, after long years of vacancy, needed to be thoroughly renovated and modernized. In 2008, the Sculpture Park was opened under the auspices of the Cragg family’s non-profit foundation. It houses a steadily growing collection of sculpture, including examples from Tony Cragg’s own large oeuvre. All is accompanied by changing exhibitions of internationally known artists. This upcoming spring, works by Swedish sculptor Eva Hild will be presented for the first time in the sculpture park.