ART CITIES:Luxemburg-Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg was a 20-year-old laboratory assistant in the rubber industry when he decided to pursue his interest in drawing and study art. Graduating from the Royal College of Art in London in 1977, his early works were characterised by a dialogue with some of the Art Movements of the day. Minimal Art, Conceptual Art and Land Art but also Arte Povera influenced his sculptural work, but they soon made way for an artistic examination of the issues that mark Cragg’s work to this very day: form and material, content and appearance, the production process.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Mudam Museum Archive

The solo exhibition with works by Tony Cragg at Mudam at Mudam Luxembourg (Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean), presents the diversity and energy characterising the work of an internationally renowned and tremendously productive artist. Cragg approaches questions of form and material by associating the techniques of classical sculpture with prospective and experimental researches. He believes that any imaginable material can be a carrier of meaning, imagination and emotions and that sculpture is a medium turned towards the future, a medium whose potential is far from exhausted. In this conception, art occupies a territory between the organic realm of nature and the functionalistic remit of industrial production. Offering a space of freedom beyond utilitarian needs is therefore what constitutes the explicitly political dimension of his art, as it allows him to give the material a new form with every new sculpture and express his feelings and emotions in constantly changing ways. “Sculpture is how material and material forms affect us”, says Cragg. Reaching beyond viewers’ emotional receptivity, it appeals primarily to their intellectual capacity of analytical perception in order to make sense of what they see. Although the works in the exhibition at Mudam are characterised by great diversity, they are all related to each other within the artist’s wider oeuvre. The two works from the Mudam collection, “Dining Motions” (1982) and “Forminifera” (1994), testify to Cragg’s early interest in the relationships between form, image and material, as well as to his curiosity for organic forms and sculpturalquestions of mass and surface, which he also addresses in other works. The “Early Forms” and the “Rational Beings” developed as two large families of works with numerous ramifications. The former that includes  works such as “Stroke” (2014) and “Migrant” (2015) were derived from laboratory glassware and other industrial vessels, which were turned into autonomous forms by means of stretching, twisting and various other deformations, while the latter grew out of basic geometric forms into organic forms through a process of swelling and germinating. “I’m Alive” (2003) in the Grand Hall, as well as “Making Sense” (2007), are offshoots from this family. Layering and stacking techniques appear in many different guises: while “Fields of Heaven” (1998) still emphasised the fragility of the glass, the layering of laminated plywood soon became a method that allowed for unsuspected formal possibilities. “Lost in Thoughts” (2012) presents the material itself in organic form, while the columns from the related series of Points of View evolve freely into autonomous objects partly suggestive of human faces shown in profile. Computer software is used to facilitate enlargements and reductions, but also to enable the merging, distorting or cross-sectioning of forms such as “False Idols” (2011), “Spring” (2014) or “Parts of the World” (2015), whose final shape was however established during the manual production. “Forminifera” (1994) consists of twelve different plaster casts, some of which are standing directly on the floor, without a plinth, while others are presented on simple iron frames. Each element is perforated by myriad holes drilled deep into the material at narrow intervals. This work is part of a series with the same title, produced by Cragg in the ‘90s.  The title of the series refers to the smallest single-celled shell-bearing organisms on earth, the foraminifera whose calcareous shells are riddled with pores. For Cragg, who worked in a science laboratory before studying art and remembers being fascinated by the fossils he found on the beaches of England’s south coast as a child, the structural and material similarity of his work with the tiny protists was immediately obvious. Yet he was clearly not interested in copying them.

Info: Curator: Clément Minighetti, Mudam Luxembourg-Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, 3 Park Dräi Eechelen, Luxembourg-Kirchberg, Duration: 11/2-3/9/17, Days & Hours: Mon & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-23:00, www.mudam.lu