Monday

Tony Cragg Installations "Bolt, 2007, Bent of Mind, 2009, Untitled 2009" at Aria

This page last updated on 03/24/2018

The Artist: Tony Craigg is British and was born in 1949 in Liverpool. Between 1966 and 1968 he worked as a lab technician for the National Rubber Producers' Research Association. In 1969 he enrolled in the foundation course at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He studied at Wimbledon School of Art from 1970 to 1973, and then until 1977 at the Royal College of Art. Cragg moved to Wuppertal, in North Rhine-Westphalia in western Germany in 1977, and in 1978 began teaching at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf -- Academy of Fine Arts. Cragg has been the recipient of numerous distinguished awards, including the Turner Prize (1988), Shakespeare Prize (2001) and Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture (2002). His biomorphic, sculptural forms investigate the physics of materials and spark a dialogue between man, material and the world.

The InstallationIn his recent works Cragg has been pushing towards a new abstracted understanding of the figure. For the last years, he has been playing with the notion of compression and expansion in the use of totemic structures where the appearance of the human profile is often a reclusive aspect of the overall structure. For his bronzes and stainless steel he has developed a method for casting forms that appear to be liquid or molten. In recent years, he has made mainly sculptures of wood, bronze, stone and mirror-finished stainless steel. Cragg’s biomorphic forms investigate the physicality of materials and spark a dialogue between man, material and the world. These three towering columns, disbursed within the Aria self-park atrium, exemplify how the sculptor uses a material such as stainless steel to its fullest extent, pushing the boundaries of his material while creating exceedingly graceful works of art with substantial presence.
                             
Bolt

Bent of Mind

Untitled