Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg
May 3 - June 9, 2007
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 3, 6-8 pm

Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Tony Cragg which will be on view at the gallery from May 3rd through June 9th.

In his new body of work, Tony Cragg brings his characteristic energy and passion to the experience of material to stimulate multiple perceptions, new ways of seeing and thinking, and to establish, as the artist says, "a relationship with materials and things in the physical world without using preconceived notions of an already occupied language."

On view will be several recent sculptures in bronze, stainless steel, stone, and wood which expand Cragg's vocabulary of "early forms" and "rational beings" into a continually renewing transformation of form, based on a shared history. This language of hybrid vessels, turning volumes, and self-enveloping forms "enacting simultaneous operations" which were characteristic of the Early Forms, merge with the elliptical formal constructions, axial profiles and silhouettes of Rational Beings, providing a point of departure for the shifting columns, internal volumes, sequential landscapes, and mutating profiles on view in the current exhibition. As Cragg says, "The work I'm making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago. Even if its not a linear thing… There is a sort of self propagating, self generative energy that is inherent in the material. And even in the term "generative", from "genus" is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which 'relativize' generation."

New sculptures in the exhibition will include the bronze works Early Forms; Level Head, Caught Dreaming, Double Relatives, Chip on his Shoulder, and Cauldron; wood works Wild Relatives, Ugly Faces, and Double Helix Wood; the stainless steel New Fanatics and Looking Down;, as well as new stone works. About "Caught Dreaming", Cragg says, it "was the first work that uses elements of both work-groups. It does this by forming a volume of sequential profiles where the orientation of the profile remains the same but, instead of staying parallel to each other, the templates are at angles to one another and provide an impulse for the form to change direction... Since this 'joining up', my view of both groups has changed again."

Writing about the evolution and relationship of the 'early forms' and 'rational beings' in "Tony Cragg : In and Out of Material", Robert Kudielka says, "The emergence of the Early Forms starting in 1988 clearly marks a turning point. Beside the proven strategies of displacement, disparate combination, change of scale and material transposition, there now appears the modeling transformation of objects. The surface of the initial form—frequently a flask, canister, or bottle—is extended, stretched, twisted and crumpled until a new, sculpturally independent form of movement arises which allows its objective origin to be traced, but relinquishes this reference in favour of the alteration as such."…

"Since "Rational Beings" (1995), the main emphasis of Cragg's work has been on constructions which successfully undermine the apparently irreconcilable antagonism between geometric and organic forms [in which] … circular or oval discs are superimposed vertically… With their slight but continuous displacements and tiltings, these combine to an inward moving overall form."

Recently important solo exhibitions of Tony Cragg's work have been seen at MAVI, Chile; Stiftung Akademie der Kunst, Berlin and Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; Neues Museum, Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design, Nürnberg; Museo Serralves, Porto; Bibliotheque national de France, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Malaga, Spain; Malmo Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden; Tate Gallery, Liverpool, and many others. In 2002-03, a retrospective of his work, Tony Cragg: Signs of Life, was seen at the Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der BDR, Bonn, Germany, accompanied by a catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition. Recent group exhibitions include SuperVision at ICA, Boston; The 80's: A Topology of Sense at Museu Serralves, Porto; and An Incomplete World, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

Cragg's many public commissions include Changing Minds (2002) for The Hobby Center for the Arts, Houston, Texas; Turbo and Ferryman, Doris Freedman Plaza, the Public Art Fund, New York (2001); Wood Crystal, Kunstverein Springhornhof, Neunkirchen, Germany (2000); New Waves, a Public Art Fund Commission at Battery Park City, New York; Archimedes Screw, commissioned by the Municipality of 's-Hertogenbosch; World Events for the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, Atlanta; Untitled at The Lille and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Unsere Broken in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf; Ordovician Pore at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Realms and Neighbors at the Merian Park, Basel, commissioned by the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949. In 1988 he was awarded the Turner Prize and represented Britain at the 43rd Venice Biennial. He has been the recipient of numerous distinguished awards including, in 1989, the Von-der-Heydt Prize; in 2001, the Shakespeare Prize; and in 2002, the Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture.

He studied at The Gloucestershire College of Art & Design (1969-70), the Wimbledon School of Art (1970-1973), and the Royal College of Art (1973-1977). From 1966 to 1968 he worked as a lab technician at the National Rubber Producers Research Association. Since 1977, he has lived and worked in Wuppertal, Germany. In 1978, Cragg became a lecturer at the Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie and was given a professorship in 1988, where he taught until 2001, when he was appointed Professor at the Universität der Künste (UdK), Berlin.

The publication Tony Cragg: In and Out of Material (Verlag Walther Konig) was recently published on the occasion of the artist's exhibition at Akademie der Kunst, Berlin, 2006 and at Stiftung Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, 2007.

Please join us at the opening reception for the artist on May 3, from 6-8 pm.