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Tony Cragg (born 9 April 1949) is a British visual artist specialized in sculpture.

Early life

Cragg was born in Liverpool. Following a period of work as a laboratory technician he first studied art on the foundation course at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design, Cheltenham and then at the Wimbledon School of Art (1969−1973). During this period he was taught by Roger Ackling, who introduced him to the sculptors Richard Long and Bill Woodrow. He completed his studies at Royal College of Art (1973–1977), where he was a contemporary of Richard Wentworth. He left Britain in 1977 and moved to Wuppertal in Germany, where he has lived and worked since.

Working practice

Many of Cragg's early works are made from found materials, discarded construction materials, and disposed household materials. This gave him a large range of mainly man-made materials and facilitated the thematic concerns that became characteristic of his work up to the present. During the 1970s he made sculptures using simple techniques such as stacking, splitting, and crushing. In 1978 he collected discarded plastic fragments and arranged them into colour categories. The first work of this kind was called 'New Stones-Newtons Tones'. Shortly after this he made works on the floor and wall reliefs, which formed images. One of these works, Britain Seen From the North (1981), features the shape of the island of Great Britain on the wall, oriented so that north is to the left. To the left of the island is the figure of a man, apparently Cragg himself, looking at the country from the position of an outsider. The whole piece is made from broken pieces of found rubbish and is often interpreted as commenting on the economic difficulties Britain was going through at that time, which had a particular effect on the north.
Auf der Lichtung in Bielefeld. 1997.

Terris Novalis in Consett is his only large-scale permanent public artwork in the UK. Consisting of two massively enlarged stainless steel engineering instruments, its material acknowledges the former importance of steel to the town. It was installed in 1997 on the Sea to Sea cycle route between Whitehaven and Sunderland.

Later, Cragg used more traditional materials, such as wood, bronze, and marble, often making simple forms from them, such as test tubes.

Cragg emphasizes that his sculptures are not made in factories but by himself. He likens work made by fabricators to relatives that you have never met. In a 2007 interview with Robert Ayers from ARTINFO, Cragg says about his excitement regarding his work,

Quotes

“There is this idea that sculpture is static, or maybe even dead, but I feel absolutely contrary to that. I’m not a religious person—I’m an absolute materialist—and for me material is exciting and ultimately sublime. When I’m involved in making sculpture, I’m looking for a system of belief or ethics in the material. I want that material to have a dynamic, to push and move and grow.

“I also want that to happen over the course of making things, so that as soon as one generation of sculptures has gone up, another generation is coming on and things are growing up around me. That’s how it seems to work for me.”[1]

Honours

Cragg won the Turner Prize in 1988. In 2001 he received the CBE for services to art and in 2002 the prestigious Piepenbrock Award for sculpture. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in 2007.

In September 2008 Cragg opened a sculpture park in Wuppertal, Germany. He is the director of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

References

1. ^ Robert Ayers (May 10, 2007), THE AI INTERVIEW Tony Cragg, ARTINFO, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/25052/tony-cragg/, retrieved 2008-04-24

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