Tony Cragg – Signs of Life 23 May – 5 October 2003
From 23 May onwards, Tony Cragg will
exhibit large sculptures on the roof garden of the Art and Exhibition
Hall. This show sums up thirty years of his activity as a sculptor
and expressly reaffirms Cragg’s standing. His sculptural work
is very diverse and can be restricted neither to a “signature
material” nor to a “signature style”. The continuity
and validity of his work is based on fundamental questions connected
to the relationship between body, material and object, issues Tony
Cragg has been working with continuously for years.
Tony
Cragg, 2003, Foto: P. Oszvald
is sculptures are fascinating
through their accessibility and aliveness – they are never static.
They are accessible at first glance because they operate with familiar
shapes and objects. But they never transmit just one perspective or
a singly valid picture. In the process of looking at them they grow
into complex phenomena which affect different levels of our understanding.
Just as faces materialise
and disappear again in the perceptual process in his most recent columns
from the series Rational Beings, so in Early Forms shapes of vessels
appear which were set into a motion that makes them change form or
disappear completely. Surfaces perform an ambivalent function in Cragg
– they can dissolve the material nature of a sculpture as easily
as they can strengthen it. As a consequence, his sculptures change
between illusion and concrete reality. Nothing is safe. The essence
of Tony Cragg’s sculptures is change. Creation and perception
are like processes and as such they are living events. For that reason,
above all, Tony Cragg’s sculptures are “Signs of Life”.
The liveliness of Cragg’s sculptures
can be immediately experienced. By working with images, a relationship
is established with the observer which is mostly absent in non-representational
sculptures. Cragg’s sculptures relate directly to human experience
in which everyone can participate and which it is fun to recognise.
They leave no one untouched.
Photo:
P. Oszvald
The sculptures of Tony Cragg are naturally
approachable in a way which makes it surprising that this solution
has not been found before. For all its complexity, the effect of a
sculpture by Tony Cragg is in the first instance very direct –
it can make itself accessible by means of a familiar, attractive material
as much as by a known image or motif which comes to expression in
the sculpture as something seen in a new and altered way. The precision
of his sculptures is evident in their comprehensible construction
– the observer can see how a sculpture was assembled in layers
of collected material, how an image can appear or disappear in the
sculpture. He can find a direct relationship to the scale of the sculpture,
experience reductions or enlargements and place himself in relation
to the sculpture. The twenty-three large sculptures on the roof garden
of the Art and Exhibition Hall illustrate the diversity of Cragg’s
sculptural work.
Photo: P. Oszvald
The show on
the roof garden is supplemented by a selection of paper works and
small-scale sculptures in the central room of the Art and Exhibition
Hall, providing an insight into the creative process underlying Tony
Cragg’s work.
Accompanying the exhibition, the Richter Verlag Düsseldorf is
publishing a comprehensive monograph with approx. 500 illustrations
and numerous essays since 1981, which documents the work of the artist
and his development in eight sections. Authors include Demosthenes
Davvetas, Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, Lynne Cooke, David Batchelor, Germano
Celant and others.
