“Sculpture is important. It's not just decoration. It helps us to think about the world.”
Tony Cragg
(b . Liverpool, England, 1949)
Before pursuing a career in the arts, Cragg was an assistant at a biochemical laboratory, primarily working with rubber. When working late in the lab, the artist would occupy his mind by drawing and “playing” with the objects around him. He then decided to devote his life to bringing form to the intangible, such as the scientific, the poetic, and the psychological, in an effort to better understand who we are and the world we inhabit.
Tony Cragg is now one of the world’s foremost sculptors. Working in a variety of different media, Cragg has worked and reworked two broad bodies of work he calls Early Forms and Rational Beings throughout his career. The Early Forms explore the possibilities of sculpturally reforming familiar objects such as containers into new and unfamiliar forms producing new emotional responses, relationships and meanings. Rational Beings examine the relationship between two apparently different aesthetic descriptions of the world: the rational, mathematically based formal constructions that go to build up the most complicated of organic forms that we respond to emotionally. Both bodies of work are fundamentally concerned with systems and how each part relates to the whole. His focus on the relationships of forms to each other and forms to their surrounding space invites the viewer to question their own relationships to the pieces both spatially and cognitively.
British Sculptor Tony Cragg was educated at the Gloucestershire College of Art, Cheltenham, the Wimbledon College of Art, and the Royal College of Art in London. Cragg was awarded the Turner Prize in 1988, made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by France in 1992, and received Japan's prestigious Praemium Imperiale in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include Houghton Hall, Norfolk, England (2021); Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, Germany (2021); the Museu Brasileiro da Escultura e Ecologia, São Paulo (2019); Boboli Gardens, Uffizi Galleries, Florence (2019); Franz Marc Museum, Kochel am See, Germany (2019); Istanbul Modern (2018), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2017); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana (2017); and The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (2016).
Cragg has lived and worked in Wuppertal, Germany, since 1979.
