Sunday, December 4, 2011
Scottish National Gallery of modern art
Reference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZM8MZNbFFY&feature=relmfu
The Herald: Artist profile
By Sarah Urwin Jones.
Reference:
http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/stage-visual-arts/artist-profile-tony-cragg-1.1113553?localLinksEnabled=false
One of Britain’s foremost sculptors, Tony Cragg makes monumental sculptures cast in bronze, steel-forged or carved from stone. Metamorphic, allusive, never entirely abstract, his forms might suggest vessels from washing-up bottles to ancient pots or ever-changing human profiles. The emphasis is on the perceptive, subjective aspect of viewing. Everywhere there is the quality of surprise, the sensation one might have looking at a natural form whose deliberateness and sophistication suggest it must, yet can’t, have been created by human hand.
Reference:
http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/stage-visual-arts/artist-profile-tony-cragg-1.1113553?localLinksEnabled=false
Edinburgh Festival 2011: Tony Cragg interview
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
Scottish National Gallery Review by Richard Dorment
In the1980s, Tony Cragg’s colourful arrangements of found objects had something of Pop art’s trashy aesthetic and instant visual appeal. Collaging bits of plastic bottles and battered frisbees into representational wall reliefs, he took the detritus of a throwaway society, detached it from its original function, and recycled it as art.
Then in the middle of that decade, Cragg began to work in bronze, an unfashionable material associated with the inertia of monumental public sculpture. Coming at the very moment when younger British artists were beginning to make work with dead sharks, human blood and cigarettes, his move away from assemblage towards a material freighted with art-historical baggage could well have made Cragg look antediluvian.
But as a show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art reveals, over the last 20 years Cragg not only faced the challenge but revelled in it, making bronzes that weigh many tons, and yet look as though they’d been freed from the laws of gravity and inertia, zigzagging giddily upwards, as vertiginous in their verticality as Brancusi’s Endless Column.
In these amazing sculptures Cragg appears at times to be engaging in a private conversation with the great masters of early 20th-century sculpture. As you move around a tower of elliptically shaped plates, the outlines turn into profiles of human faces just as happens in that icon of modernist sculpture, Renato Bertelli ’s 1933 Continuous Profile (Head of Mussolini), while in Runner (2010) Cragg is clearly riffing on the moving figure in Umberto Boccioni’s famous Unique Forms of Continuity in Space from 1913. In each case he takes a work that is already dynamic and torques it, gives it an extra spin, speeds it up.
Cragg is also a dab hand at setting up expectations and then refusing to do what we expect him to do. This is as true of individual sculptures as it is of Cragg’s entire career. In Bend of Mind, for example, you assume that the distinct profile you see from one side will vanish as you circle round the sculpture. Instead, the opposite happens and the profile you started with gradually turns into a full face.
And what Cragg does in bronze he’ll sometimes vary in wood or metal, or else pursue entirely different trains of thought in ceramic or fibreglass. He even returns to assemblage: a two-part piece consisting of a wooden workman’s bench and what looks like an anthropoid shape crawling on the floor beside it he renders both repellent and sinister by encrusting the entire surface with scores of screw-hooks, as though it has erupted in a painful disease of the skin.
And some pieces are so eccentric they appear to be one-offs, or happy accidents. I still can’t figure out what in art history might have inspired the scale model of a gothic cathedral made of red ceramic entitled Small Church. The building lies on its head like a plane that’s crashed nose first on the ground. With both its steeple and “spine” (the nave) crushed, its flying buttresses lie exposed like the rib cage of some prehistoric animal.
Cragg’s sculptures refuse to be categorised. Once you engage with one, it’s hard to pull yourself away. He is inexhaustible. Against stiff competition from Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon, Richard Long, and Richard Wentworth, he is the most significant British sculptor of his generation.
Reference:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/edinburgh-festival-reviews/8690554/Edinburgh-Festival-2011-Tony-Cragg-Scottish-National-GalleryHiroshi-Sugimoto-Dean-Gallery-Robert-Rauschenberg-Inverleith-House-review.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)