Tony Cragg New sculptures

Tony Cragg’s most recent bodies of work showcase his latest formal developments, shedding light on the artist’s unrelenting search for new material forms. Cragg’s unique sculptural language crystallises his ‘raw, naked responses [...] to the primary material sources that are deeper than just the surface appearance of things and create forms that express our lives and our essential humanity.’ Through his abstract polymorphic sculptures, Cragg strives to kindle ineffable reactions in the beholder.

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Artworks gain significance exactly because they offer an experience and experiment that involved going ex-, beyond the perimeter of our practicable, known and describable existences, where the signs have not yet been formulated into symbols and there is no descriptive vocabulary: they knock on the door not only of the unknown but of the unknowable. — Tony Cragg

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While his early sculptures were accumulations of found objects, Cragg’s recent works are created in more traditional sculptural materials. In this new series of sculptures, the artist employs Corten steel – a type of steel alloy that forms a stable, rust-like appearance after several years’ exposure to weather – which creates an almost velvety texture on the works’ surface, conveying a haptic sense of visuality. Cragg’s deep engagement with materiality is coupled with a sustained investigation of form. In his own words, ‘Every change in material form has a precise and immediate consequence for our thoughts, feelings and course of action and, with that, the future.’

Incident, 2023
Stainless steel, 134 kg

160 x 58 x 56 cm (62.99 x 22.83 x 22.05 in)

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Incident, 2023 Stainless steel, 134 kg 160 x 58 x 56 cm (62.99 x 22.83 x 22.05 in)

Untitled, 2023
Corten steel, ca. 450 kg
240 x 86 x 98 cm (94.49 x 33.86 x 38.58 in)

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Untitled, 2023 Corten steel, ca. 450 kg 240 x 86 x 98 cm (94.49 x 33.86 x 38.58 in)

In his recent series of Incidents, Cragg harnesses the expressive possibilities of the steel medium to create eminently futuristic sculptures. The svelte works stand upright, their curvaceous yet strikingly spare forms jutting upwards, seeming to defy gravity. Creating a stark contrast between positive and negative space, these towering works heighten the viewer’s sense of spatiality. The reflective nature of the stainless steel in Incident (2023) further interacts with the space, reflecting and at times deforming the work’s surroundings.

Masks (2023) depicts two inextricably linked forms that oscillate between humanoid figures and geological formations, blurring the boundaries between body and landscape. The work is reminiscent of Constantin Brâncuși’s Kiss (1916; Philadelphia Museum of Art) in which two embracing figures merge into a single form. In Cragg’s sculpture, the outline of both profiles emerges and recedes, resolving from certain viewpoints, before dissolving back into abstraction.

Masks, 2023
Bogoak, 298kg
140 x 111 x 55cm (55.12 x 43.7 x 21.65 in)

Brâncuși
The Kiss, 1907–8
Philadelphia Museum of Art

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[T]wo heads are pushed into each other to create a new and compressed sculptural object that reads as head, body and relief simultaneously, and an image of inseparability. One of the things that makes Cragg’s sculptural imagination so intriguing is that, although he is not strictly-speaking a figurative sculptor, making accurate three-dimensional representations of anatomy, he is nevertheless deeply preoccupied with the forms and movements of the human body, both inside and outside. – Jon Wood, art historian and curator

The human figure is also evoked in Cragg’s Integers (2021). A torso seems to emerge from the work’s intriguing anthropomorphic form, whose organic undulations and curves are echoed in the entrancing patterns of the fleshy-pink wood’s grain. Cragg seamlessly blends the beauty of naturally occurring visual phenomena with that of his own artistry.

 

 

Integers, 2021

Wood, 140 kg

110 x 50 x 74 cm (43.31 x 19.69 x 29.13 in)

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This work from 2023 epitomises Tony Cragg’s ability to create entirely unprecedented forms that nevertheless spark a sense of recognition as they gesture to the world around us. The compellingly enigmatic, figmental sculpture is adorned with holes and short tentacle-like appendages, which lend it the appearance of a live sea creature or a tendrilled plant. The biomorphic sculpture exudes a sense of metamorphosis and growth, as though it were suspending a moment of flux. As Jon Wood notes, Cragg’s works ‘remind us that all is ultimately moving, seething and active in the world and that nothing is really static.’

Untitled, 2023
Bronze, 120kg
100 x 53 x 82 cm (39.37 x 20.87 x32.28 in)

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Off the Mountain (2023) visually alludes to geological forms and patterns, with overlapping strata of nero porto pressed into each other to create an entrancingly convoluted sculpture. The diagonality of the work suggests the capture of an intense and yet transient moment of movement and transformation. The sculpture’s pulsating forms extend both inwards and outwards, highlighting the playful relationship between organic and geometric shapes.

 

Off the Mountain, 2023
Stone (nero portoro), 460 kg
90 x 65 x 69 cm (35.43 x 25.59 x 27.17 in)

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From fossilisation to futurism, Tony Cragg’s elusive sculptural forms never cease to shine a new light on reality. This corpus demonstrates his unyielding ability to trigger reactions that evade verbal description through his sculptures, firmly rooted as they are in the affective realm.