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Lot Essay
‘If we’re being optimistic, the human race may have a few hundred thousand years practice with the material, if not longer, and our relationship to it will have to become much more complicated and sophisticated… we will also have to continually readjust the psychological parameters of our world. We will have to get used to the idea of sitting in this room made of molecules with radioactivity rushing through it.’
—TONY CRAGG
A writhing bronze helix winding up into space, Tony Cragg’s Inside Compass (2013) is an exquisite, dizzying display of the artist’s later sculptural practice. Though finding initial fame in the 1970s for repurposing motley groups of everyday objects into ingenious sculptural assemblages, since the 1990s Cragg has developed an extensive series of works under the name Rational Beings, producing sumptuously organic, almost liquefied abstract forms across a range of materials; Inside Compass represents an entry into a particularly iconic collection of helical, whirlwind-like forms begun in the early part of this century. These works transform their source material into spinning accumulations of form that seem to slice through dimensions, exploring not only the possibilities of geometric space, but the way in which formal structures combine to create organic matter and shape.
The role of the human figure looms large in Cragg’s work, even when our sense of its presence in a specific work seems muted or obscured. At the root of his thought lies the question of the human’s relationship with the material of reality: not only how humans (and not just sculptors) interact with matter, but equally how matter has evolved into the human form. In Inside Compass, circular discs are stacked into a whirling spiral of forms in which faces seem to blur into focus; the sense is of a sculpture caught between physical states, both a teetering pile of solid matter, and a free-flowing incarnation of air itself, a liminal space from which suggestions of the human form evolve. As the artist says, ‘Although I have rarely attempted to depict the figure it will always be a preoccupation. But, more in the sense of the question, “Why do we look like this?”’ (T. Cragg, ‘The Articulated Column Continued’, Tony Cragg: In and Out of Material, Cologne, 2006, pp. 23-4). In a sense, Cragg’s sculpture stages the history of this question, while playing on our own inbuilt psychological tendency to recognise the human figure in everything we see: Inside Compass is both a mythological vision of man emerging from chaos, and a mirror reflecting our need to find our own reflection in the world.
—TONY CRAGG
A writhing bronze helix winding up into space, Tony Cragg’s Inside Compass (2013) is an exquisite, dizzying display of the artist’s later sculptural practice. Though finding initial fame in the 1970s for repurposing motley groups of everyday objects into ingenious sculptural assemblages, since the 1990s Cragg has developed an extensive series of works under the name Rational Beings, producing sumptuously organic, almost liquefied abstract forms across a range of materials; Inside Compass represents an entry into a particularly iconic collection of helical, whirlwind-like forms begun in the early part of this century. These works transform their source material into spinning accumulations of form that seem to slice through dimensions, exploring not only the possibilities of geometric space, but the way in which formal structures combine to create organic matter and shape.
The role of the human figure looms large in Cragg’s work, even when our sense of its presence in a specific work seems muted or obscured. At the root of his thought lies the question of the human’s relationship with the material of reality: not only how humans (and not just sculptors) interact with matter, but equally how matter has evolved into the human form. In Inside Compass, circular discs are stacked into a whirling spiral of forms in which faces seem to blur into focus; the sense is of a sculpture caught between physical states, both a teetering pile of solid matter, and a free-flowing incarnation of air itself, a liminal space from which suggestions of the human form evolve. As the artist says, ‘Although I have rarely attempted to depict the figure it will always be a preoccupation. But, more in the sense of the question, “Why do we look like this?”’ (T. Cragg, ‘The Articulated Column Continued’, Tony Cragg: In and Out of Material, Cologne, 2006, pp. 23-4). In a sense, Cragg’s sculpture stages the history of this question, while playing on our own inbuilt psychological tendency to recognise the human figure in everything we see: Inside Compass is both a mythological vision of man emerging from chaos, and a mirror reflecting our need to find our own reflection in the world.