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Lot Essay
Rippling and twisting, Tony Cragg’s Easter is movement arrested in space. Created in 2015 from painted wood, the life-sized columnar sculpture shines cherry red. When viewed from different aspects, multiple human faces become visible in silhouette. It is an anthropomorphic embodiment of emotion, the elemental forces made concrete. For Cragg—whose solo exhibitions at the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporanea, Lisbon, and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, recently closed—sculpture is above all ‘an extension of himself’ (T. Cragg, ‘The Articulated Column’ 1996, reprinted in T. Cragg, In and Out of Material, exh. cat., Akademie der Künst, Berlin, 2007, p. 185). At once corporeal and terrestrial, Easter is a study in mutable tactility, with every angle proffering a new, as yet unseen configuration.
Primary colours have long been important in Cragg’s practice. In the 1980s, they played a central role in assemblage works which emerged out of his exploration of land art. Works such as Red Bottle (1982, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago) were comprised from pieces of discarded plastic collected by the artist along the banks of the Rhine, sorted by colour and arranged into striking large-compositions. In the years that followed Cragg explored different media before embarking on the biomorphic sculptures which have since become his most celebrated and iconic creations. From the turn of the century Cragg began to reincorporate primary colours into these signature works.
In 1969, just before starting at university, Cragg saw the landmark exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at Kusthalle Bern, and that, coupled with new discourses around the isolation of process and material, greatly influenced his nascent practice. His earliest works—a handful of sand tossed into the air, for example—were experiments in the ephemeral: attempts at drawing in three dimensions. Such works underscored Cragg’s conviction that sculpture is first and foremost an action, still a fundamental tenet of the artist’s practice. For Cragg, the best work results from a transference of sorts between artist and material, a sense keenly felt in the haptic nature of Easter. In his ongoing pursuit to identify a physical vocabulary for expression, Cragg remains as dedicated as ever to questions of materiality, scale, and form: ‘Sculpture,’ he has said, ‘belongs for several reasons in a rare and extraordinary class of its own’ (T. Cragg, ‘To Viersen Sculpture’, in Tony Cragg: Signs of Life, exh. cat. Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn 2003, p. 45).
Primary colours have long been important in Cragg’s practice. In the 1980s, they played a central role in assemblage works which emerged out of his exploration of land art. Works such as Red Bottle (1982, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago) were comprised from pieces of discarded plastic collected by the artist along the banks of the Rhine, sorted by colour and arranged into striking large-compositions. In the years that followed Cragg explored different media before embarking on the biomorphic sculptures which have since become his most celebrated and iconic creations. From the turn of the century Cragg began to reincorporate primary colours into these signature works.
In 1969, just before starting at university, Cragg saw the landmark exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at Kusthalle Bern, and that, coupled with new discourses around the isolation of process and material, greatly influenced his nascent practice. His earliest works—a handful of sand tossed into the air, for example—were experiments in the ephemeral: attempts at drawing in three dimensions. Such works underscored Cragg’s conviction that sculpture is first and foremost an action, still a fundamental tenet of the artist’s practice. For Cragg, the best work results from a transference of sorts between artist and material, a sense keenly felt in the haptic nature of Easter. In his ongoing pursuit to identify a physical vocabulary for expression, Cragg remains as dedicated as ever to questions of materiality, scale, and form: ‘Sculpture,’ he has said, ‘belongs for several reasons in a rare and extraordinary class of its own’ (T. Cragg, ‘To Viersen Sculpture’, in Tony Cragg: Signs of Life, exh. cat. Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn 2003, p. 45).