21 February – 16 July 2016

Tony Cragg: Sculptures featured 25 new sculptures of steel, bronze, wood, fibreglass and stone. The exhibition coincided with one of the artist's solo exhibitions at the Eremitage St. Petersburg (March – June 2016) and a retrospective at the Von-der-Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal (April – August 2016).

Cragg's sculptural œuvre was originally motivated by his encounter with English Land Art and Performance, and is still distinguished by an immense wealth of surprising formal inventions and combinations. Cragg sees himself as a materialist, constantly seeking to explore and expand new materials. He has frequently applied techniques such as stacking, layering and heaping to different types of waste material and everyday objects, giving them an unexpected interpretation. Here, it is primarily steel, bronze and wood that he uses for his almost geologically layered arrangements.

"Cragg's materialism suggests several meanings. In its most comprehensive sense, it implies a philosophical point of view, a conception of the world concentrating on physical phenomena and those circumstances which can be directly deduced from them. His artistic work shows a view of the human being gained through his relation to the environment – ranging from geological formations to urban constructions, from the tools we use to shape the world to furniture and other objects we produce in order to satisfy our needs." – Lynne Cooke, 2003