ART CITIES:Paris-Tony Cragg
Tony Cragg is one of the world’s most foremost sculptors. His work is notable for its exploration of different materials, including found objects and raw matter of various kinds. His early, stacked works present a taxonomical understanding of the world, and he has said that he sees manmade objects as “Fossilized keys to a past time which is our present”.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: : Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Archive
Tony Cragg’s solo exhibition “Inhabitants: Sculpture” features a dozen sculptures in bronze, wood and steel, made between 2018 and 2020. These new works connote the movement, change and transience of elements caught in the process of transformation. Cragg’s sculptural practice was originally informed by English Land Art and Performance Art, and is distinguished by an ongoing experimentation with formal inventions and combinations. Cragg considers himself a radical materialist, constantly seeking to explore and expand the possibilities of new materials. He has frequently applied techniques such as stacking and layering to different types of waste material, interpreting everyday objects in unexpected ways. In the works in Inhabitants: Sculpture, the artist continues this exploration primarily through steel, bronze and wood, used to create unique, almost geologically layered sculptural forms. Cragg develops these forms from ‘artistic sediments that appear to arise from different eras’, as art historian Eva Maria Stadler describes. The implied motion of these biomorphic forms is reminiscent of Italian Futurist speed fanatics such as Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) and Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), while the verticality of his pillar-like sculptures recalls Constantin Brâncuși (1876–1957), who similarly arrived at a reduction of the natural form through his unique approach to abstraction. “Hollow Head” (2019) belongs to a series of works that are the result of subtracting one sculptural form from another. The two works entitled “Pair” (both 2019), one composed of wood, the other of stainless steel, each consist of two free-standing elliptical columns. The tense relationship between these forms led Cragg to superimpose sculptural volumes inside one another. In doing so, he has created sculptures that infer specific internal boundaries, at times supplementing or subtracting from one another. In Frequencies (2019) expresses the interrelationship between different modes of thought as a form of topography. Of his “Skulls” series, also on view, Cragg explains, “Any impression of solidity is an illusion. This applies as much to aspects of our physical reality as to sculptural traditions. These skeletal volumes reveal their inner structures and leave the viewer with no illusions”. Cragg’s recent “Stacks” (2018) represent the continuation of a theme he first explored as a student at the Royal College of Art, creating earthy accumulations of discarded materials that have since developed into sleek columnar forms in wood, stone, bronze and steel. The artworks are the result of the experiences that artists have had while making the work and showing it to others is an offer to share that experience of adventure and discovery. It is comparable in some ways with visiting an undiscovered landscape, encountering a new species, or even with learning a new fact of physics. Art shows us who we are and where we stand. Ultimately all art, no matter how abstract, revolves around and relates to the human figure and human nature.
Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 7 rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 11/9-17/10/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.ropac.net
