Overview
The Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by British sculptor Tony Cragg, opening to the public on November 8 and continuing through December 30, 2000. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, from 10 am to 6 pm.
On view in both the North and South galleries will be new sculptures by the artist realized in bronze, limestone, polymers, and marble (all from 2000). With these works, Cragg creates a new generation of the forms he has been exploring over the past decade.
Tony Cragg: New Work
November 8 - December 30, 2000
The Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by British sculptor Tony Cragg, opening to the public on November 8 and continuing through December 30, 2000. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, from 10 am to 6 pm.
On view in both the North and South galleries will be new sculptures by the artist realized in bronze, limestone, polymers, and marble (all from 2000). With these works, Cragg creates a new generation of the forms he has been exploring over the past decade. Bronze sculptures, such as Sinbad, Rod, and Transmission, extend the Early Forms series from the 1990s. As in previous works such as Wirbesaule, strings of numbers and letters are embedded in the outer surface of the bright red Formulation (right turning, left turning) and the black Formulation (stance). The new black dice work is a variation on the earlier Secretions sculptures, and the limestone and marble pieces on display extend Cragg's investigation of the silhouette—in this case, emphasizing the multiple images that a single silhouette can evoke when viewed from various axes.
Over the last two decades, Cragg's work has been marked by its appetite for assimilating a variety of materials and processes, and by its use of sources from both nature and culture. Cragg's lifelong interest in chemistry and biology has led to an evolution in form from particles, to layers, to skins, to vessels. For materials, the artist gravitates towards wood, glass, stone, and metals traditionally associated with monumental sculpture, bronze and iron. He will alternatively choose found objects made from synthetic compounds, such as polystyrene and carbon- or glass-fiber resin. A number of Cragg's works also feature industrial and utilitarian objects: cans; bottles; machinery parts; tools; jars; laboratory vessels; and glass hybrids. Cragg's enduring fascination with artificial materials and forms stems from their singular capacity to express the values and procedures of our contemporary industrialized world.
Throughout his career, Cragg's sculptural strategies have ranged from grouping found objects in space, to assembling these objects via industrial processes into new forms, to constructing raw materials into architectonic structures, to creating open compositions that integrate aspects of the above. More recently, Cragg has begun creating semi-abstract human figures, moving away from a minimalist geometry and introducing a new form based on the silhouette into his sculptural lexicon. In some of the works from the 1990's, such as Early Forms, Flotsam, Forminifera, Rational Beings, and Secretions, the artist combines organic forms with thick outer layers, built up of polystyrene and covered with carbon fiber, fiberglass, or rows of dice.
Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949. 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). Since 1977, he has lived and worked in Wuppertal, Germany. In 1978, he became a lecturer at the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie and was appointed a full professor in 1988. He is now a Co-Director. In 1988 he was awarded the Turner Prize and represented Britain at the 43rd Venice Biennial. His many public commissions include: 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.
His work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including The New Thing Breathing: Recent Work by Tony Cragg, held this year at the Tate Gallery Liverpool, and a major survey of his sculptures from 1970 to 1995, organized in 1996 by the Centre Georges Pompidou. Additional solo exhibitions include the Kunstausstellung Holderbank, Holderbank; the Vonderheydt Museum, Wuppertal; the Lenbachhaus, Stadtische Gallery, Munich; the Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart; The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Tokyo; and the Reina Sofia, Madrid. Cragg has also participated in such international group exhibitions as The House of Sculpture at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; At Home with Art at the Tate Gallery; The 47th Venice Biennial; Zeitwenden at the Rheinische Landsmuseum (travelling to the Bonn Kunstmuseum and the Moderum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig); and Prospect/Retrospect at the Kunstmuseum Luzern.
