Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg

British Turner Prize-winning sculptor. He was the director of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf until August 2013. Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949, where his father worked in the aircraft industry as an electrical engineer. In 1966 Cragg started work as a lab technician in the National Rubber Producers Research Association. He lives and works in Wuppertal, Germany. Tony Cragg emerged in the late 1970s with a bold practice that questioned and tested the limits of a wide variety of traditional sculptural materials, including bronze, steel, glass, wood, and stone. “I’m an absolute materialist, and for me material is exciting and ultimately sublime,” he has said.

Cragg has been known to merge contemporary industrial materials with the suggestion of the functional forms of mundane objects and ancient vessels—like jars, bottles, and test tubes—resulting in sublime, sinuous, and twisting forms.

 

I was honoured to see a Tony Cragg piece myself at the Albert Docks next to the Tate Gallery in Liverpool. It was called Raleigh. ‘Raleigh’ is made from six separate elements, two cast-iron bollards, two granite bollards and two horn-shaped forms that the artist had specially cast in iron. They are arranged on the ground with the four bollards providing a base or platform for the two horn-shaped forms. The title of the piece appears to relate to the sixteenth-century navigator Sir Walter Raleigh.