The State Art Gallery in Sopot proudly presents the art of Tony Cragg. Cragg has relentlessly pursued new relationships between people and the physical world for more than four decades. He is a master of the material, freely using its different types, such as stone, bronze, wood, metal, synthetic materials, and glass. In his sculptures, a propensity for experimentation is matched with unfailing perfection.

Cragg understands sculpture as a study of how material and physical forms shape and impact our ideas and emotions. He repeatedly affirms that he is uninterested in mimetic tendencies to reproduce or imitate anything but in creating new, unknown forms, where creative imagination is the limit.

His works are dynamic, vital, and rich in sensual manifestations of matter. Two series, Early Forms and Rational Beings, are a case in point. The artist creates new, unfamiliar forms by transforming familiar objects from everyday life, yielding new relationships, meanings, and emotional reactions. He transforms rational, mathematically-based constructs into complex organic forms. In his sculptures, the human figure can become a geometric composition of molecules, cells, organs, and processes. Cragg's works do not imitate nature and how we look but are about why we look the way we do and are the way we are.

The exhibition features three sets of Cragg's works: on its premises, the Gallery displays the artist's glass sculptures and installations and the drawings and watercolors accompanying them, while his sculptures will be installed in Park Północny in Sopot.

The works made of glass show the evolution of the artist's style from the early 1990s to the present. Cragg initially used readymades or found objects, such as jars, bottles, wine casks, and laboratory vessels. He created colorful, decorative compositions by assembling them into new entities, i.e., emballages and installations. Around 2009, the artist began working with Adriano Berengo and his Studio in Murano. This collaboration has borne fruit with organic sculptures inspired by nature and architecture. Taking advantage of the beauty of glass, its infinite possibilities, and the extraordinary fluidity of matter, the author transposed the ancient technique into innovative contemporary forms, which we can admire at the Sopot exhibition.

From the earliest years of his career, Cragg made drawings, prints, and watercolors. The exhibition, therefore, gathers drawings from 1999 to the present.

In addition, Park Północny in Sopot, stretching along the Baltic shore behind the Grand Hotel, is the setting of Cragg's iconic sculptures: Points of View – meandering silver columns, Mixed Feelings – a form that writhes dynamically upwards, and Versus and Masks, so far exhibited in museums, sculpture parks and public venues around the world.

The exhibition of sculptures and drawings in Sopot is co-organized with the Tony Cragg Studio. and curated by Eulalia Domanowska. It is held under the auspices of the British Council and the British Embassy, with the support of Hestia's Artistic Journey and ERGO Hestia.

Images: Tomek Maryks