By Emma Crichton-Miller.
The afternoon I meet Tony Cragg in a hot upstairs gallery in London’s Bond Street to talk about his new show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, he has flown over from Germany, where he has lived, in Wuppertal, since 1977. A renowned British sculptor, the 1988 Turner Prize winner and a leading figure in the remarkable generation of sculptors that emerged in the late Seventies, he is also currently director of the respected Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf. He acknowledges that while he settled there largely by accident – he followed his first wife back home – what Germany offered, in the Seventies, besides ample studio space, was “a sense of the necessity of contemporary art”.
Behind us as we talk, four sculptures stand on plinths. One sleek black bronze, Hollow Head (2008), rises up, a spiral of matter surrounding a void, the shape revealing, as you walk around it, a human face in profile and then revolving once again into abstraction. Another bronze, It is, It isn’t (2010), plays a similar game of hide and seek, at one turn offering smooth amorphous curves, at another a human face.
The mind locks eagerly onto the profile, and yet the power of these pieces lies in the movement from intriguing mass to recognition. Two further pieces, twisting, interlocking towers of piled matter that seem to dance or writhe like baroque gladiators or lovers in the muted orange of rusted steel, look almost as if they have bored vertically upwards out of the soil.
It is this conviction of their own necessity that is one of the essential characteristics of Cragg’s work. It is there also in the looping urgent drawings that line the walls and which, alongside watercolours and prints, will also be in Edinburgh. Drawing was Cragg’s first love. But, required to make a sculpture as part of an art foundation course in Cheltenham in 1969, he says: “I very quickly realised that every single change of volume or line or surface actually did give me a different idea, it did give me a different emotion and a different set of associations, and I found that fascinating.” By the time Cragg emerged from the Royal College of Art eight years later, he was a sculptor.
Since then, he has played obsessively with volume, line and surface, using wood, glass, plastic, bronze, steel, polystyrene, plaster, ceramic and a variety of found materials, and moving in scale from small objets to massive pieces that occupy the landscape.
What unites all his work is intense curiosity about forms and materials, and the world itself: “These are not at all things that people need for any practical purpose in the world,” he says. “But they do reveal so much for me as I am making them. They offer me a new way to see the world, and that is all I am interested in.”
This major exhibition, part of the Edinburgh Festival, offers the first full survey of Cragg’s work in Britain for more than a decade, and runs in a year that will also see shows in Venice, Duisburg, Paris and Dallas. Featuring nearly 50 major sculptures, and using the grounds to display work too large for the main exhibition rooms, the show is focused on work from the past 15 years, with some earlier pieces.
Cragg’s early work was influenced by Minimalism and Conceptualism. It often involved site-specific installation and performance. Stack (1975), the startling cube he made from layers of mixed materials, and which looked so convincing in the RA’s recent Modern British Sculpture show, was a notable exception.
In the early Eighties, he changed tack decisively: “I very often ended up with some material or with some kind of an object and I would wonder what would happen if I spent more time in the studio with this.” He bought a bigger studio, a former tank repair garage in Wuppertal, got some technical help and began making discrete objects.
Two significant strands of work have sustained his production ever since: Early Forms and Rational Beings. The Rational Beings are those spiralling almost-faces. Early Forms are born of Cragg’s conviction that the sculptor’s role is “to make the things that aren’t there. There is no point in copying what is there – the role of art is to open a door onto other realities.” Haunted by the idea of all the extinct creatures which lie between those we see, he makes brilliantly coloured hybrid vessels and creatures, challenges to “the simple, flat and boring” homogenised, industrial world we inhabit.
Everything he does, unusually for a major contemporary sculptor, has its origin in hands-on making: “You play around with the material, looking for a form, and suddenly you find forms that say more than you had thought possible, and that is creation, that is poetry.”
Reference:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/edinburgh-festival/8668954/Edinburgh-Festival-2011-Tony-Cragg-interview.html
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