Tony Cragg
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Works
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Followers
Artist Spotlight
Tony Cragg, Sculptor of Living Matter
In the autumn of 2023, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg presented a sweeping survey of Tony Cragg's work that drew visitors from across Europe and reaffirmed what serious collectors and museum curators have long understood: Cragg is among the most vital sculptors working anywhere in the world today. His pieces filled the galleries with an almost biological insistence, as though the bronze and steel and wood had arrived at their spiraling, biomorphic forms through some process of natural selection rather than human intention. The exhibition was a reminder that Cragg, now in his mid seventies, is not… Continue reading
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Artists in conversation
Anish Kapoor
Kapoor shares Cragg's interest in biomorphic form and the philosophical tension between materiality and perception. Both emerged from the same generation of British sculptors exploring how physical substances can embody abstract ideas.
Richard Deacon
Deacon works with fabricated organic forms that similarly investigate the boundary between natural and manufactured shapes. Like Cragg, he is a Turner Prize winner whose sculptures foreground material process and transformation.
Erwin Wurm
Wurm shares Cragg's preoccupation with how everyday objects and materials can be transformed into philosophically charged sculptural forms. Both artists interrogate the relationship between familiar objects and abstracted or distorted physical states.
Artists who inspired them
Joseph Beuys
Beuys established the conceptual and material seriousness that shaped Cragg's early thinking about sculpture as a means of social and philosophical inquiry. His expansion of what counted as sculptural material was a direct precedent for Cragg's found plastic assemblages.
Hans Arp
Arp's biomorphic abstract forms provided a foundational visual language for the kind of organic, flowing sculpture Cragg later developed in his bronze and wood works. Cragg has cited the tradition of biomorphic abstraction that Arp pioneered as central to his practice.
