Tony Cragg in Alternative Reality
Alternate Reality
Curator Eulalia Domanowska
The State Art Gallery in Sopot presents the work of one of the most famous British artists - Tony Cragg. For over forty years, he has been constantly striving to find new relationships between people and the material world. He is a master of material and freely uses various types of material, including stone, bronze, wood, metal, synthetic materials and glass. The tendency to experiment is combined in his sculptures with unfailing perfection.
Cragg understands sculpture as a study of how material and material forms affect and create our ideas and emotions. He repeats many times that he is not interested in mimetic tendencies to reproduce or imitate anything - he is interested in creating new, unknown forms, unlimited by nothing but creative imagination.
His works are characterized by dynamism, vitality, richness of sensual manifestations of matter. Two series Early Forms and Rational Beings are a good example. By transforming well-known objects from everyday life, the artist creates new, unknown forms by creating new relationships, meanings and emotional reactions. He changes rational constructions based on mathematics into complex organic forms. In his sculptures, the human figure can become a geometric composition of molecules, cells, organs and processes. Tony Cragg's work is not about nature and how we look - but about why we look the way we look and why we are the way we are.
The exhibition presents three sets of his works - glass sculptures and installations, accompanying drawings and watercolors in the gallery space, and sculptures located in the North Park in Sopot.
The works made of glass represent the evolution of the artist's style from the early 1990s to the present. Tony Cragg initially used ready-made or found objects, such as jars, bottles, wineskins and laboratory utensils. Combining them into new wholes, emballages and installations, he created colorful, decorative compositions. Around 2009, the artist began a collaboration with Adriano Berengo and his studio on the island of Murano, which produced a series of organic sculptures inspired by nature and architecture. The author, using the beauty of glass, its endless possibilities and the extraordinary fluidity of matter, transposed the ancient technique into innovative contemporary forms that we can admire at the Sopot exhibition.
Drawings, graphics and watercolors were created from the earliest years of the British master's work. Tony Cragg draws pencil on paper almost every day, both sketches for his projects and stand-alone works. We show works created from 1999 to the present.
Above all, however, in the scenery of the North Park in Sopot, stretching over the Baltic Sea behind the Grand Hotel, we present iconic sculptures by Tony Cragg, Points of View - meandering silver columns; Mixed Feelings - a dynamically rising form, and Versus and Masks, shown in many museums around the world, sculpture parks and public space.
The exhibition of sculptures and drawings in Sopot is organized jointly with Tony Cragg's Studio and under the patronage of the British Council, the British Embassy and the patronage of ERGO Hestia and the Hestia Artistic Journey Foundation.
Tony Cragg has been creating and exhibiting since 1969. He graduated from Wimbledon School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. After graduation, he moved to Wuppertal in 1977, where he lives and works to this day. He participated in Documenta 7 and 8 in Kassel and represented the UK at the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988. In the same year he won the Turner Prize for the best British artist awarded by the Tate Gallery in London. He also received the prestigious Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo in 2007 and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1st Class (2012) and the Life Achivemenet in Contemporary Sculpture Award in Düsseldorf in 2017. He was a professor at the École nationale superieure des beaux-arts in Paris (1999-2009) and at the famous Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, with which he was associated since 1978, and from 1988 to 2016 he worked there as a professor. In the years 2009-2013, he was the rector there. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for lifetime achievement and merits in British-German cooperation (2016).
Tony Cragg's art exhibitions are held extensively in museums and galleries around the world. Among others, at the Tate Gallery in London, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Louvre Museum in Paris, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, Van der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, Boboli Gardens in Florence, Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Great Britain, Sydney Biennale, São Paulo Biennale, Louisiana Museum in Denmark and many other prestigious art institutions.
