ART CITIES:Paris-Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg is one of the world’s most foremost sculptors. His work is notable for its exploration of different materials, including found objects and raw matter of various kinds. His early, stacked works present a taxonomical understanding of the world, and he has said that he sees manmade objects as “Fossilized keys to a past time which is our present”.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Archive

The new solo exhibition by Tony Cragg hosts 25 new sculptures of steel, bronze, wood, fibreglass and stone. The exhibition covers three floors of the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Pantin and includes new works in stone, bronze, stainless wood and polished stained steel.  In the drawing space, Cragg is presenting a series of recent drawings that highlight his quintessential ideas on how new forms can emerge from both figures and landscapes.  In “Early Forms”, a series of cast works, which began in the late ‘80s, Cragg has created a catalogue of unique sculptural forms derived from a diverse range of vessel types, from ancient flasks to test-tubes, jam jars and detergent bottles, that are twisted and mutated together to make new forms.  The title refers to the fact that vessels are among the simplest and earliest surviving man-made forms. During the 1990s the “Early Forms” became increasingly complex. In his latest sculptures, Tony Cragg draws on their idea and increases the elasticity and dynamics of their composition to such an extent, making it hard to believe that such forms could actually be made out of bronze. This dynamic reaches a preliminary peak in the monumental sculpture “Stroke” (2014), resembling a giant frozen brushstroke. A new way of cutting the shape, of fanning it out, is a further characteristic of his latest sculptures, such as “Hardliner” (2013), “Parts of Life” (2014) and “Parts of Life II” (2015), where the outer surfaces have apparently been effortlessly fragmented. In his most recent works, Cragg has been pushing towards a new abstracted understanding of figure and form.  He plays with the notions of compression and expansion in the use of totemic structures in which the human profile is a reclusive aspect of the overall structure.

Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 69, Avenue du Général Leclerc, Pantin, Paris, Duration: 21/2-30/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, http://ropac.net