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Lot Essay
Curving and contorted, Red Square (2013) is a striking example Turner Prize winner Tony Cragg’s celebrated practice of creating forms engaged in opposite motions. Characterized by their turning volumes, undulating forms and self-enveloping shapes, Cragg’s sculptures transcend the apparently irreconcilable antagonism between geometry and organic form. Red Square alludes to this perennial tension in the artist’s work, as its planes twist and fold into an inward moving overall shape which resembles anything but a square. Part of the artist’s series in ‘Primary Colours’, the present work sees Cragg’s unrivalled mastery of material energized further through adding the new element of colour to cast bronze. Applying a bold matt red finish to bronze, rather than traditional patinas, represents a complex technological feat which the artist achieves through borrowing techniques from the German car industry. Seeking to establish ‘a relationship with materials and things in the physical world without using preconceived notions of an already occupied language’ (Tony Cragg quoted in https://archive.mariangoodman.com/exhibitions/2007-05-03_tony-cragg/ - accessed 26 March 2018), Cragg, who is based in Germany and intensely submerged in the world of science, innovatively adapts these manufacturing practices to produce a playful yet beautifully self-contained work.