ART-PRESENTATION:Tony Cragg in Boboli Gardens
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. Minimal Art, Conceptual Art Land Art but aond 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 Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Le Gallerie Degli Uffizi Archive
The exhibition “Tony Cragg” at Boboli Gardens presents 16 works by the English master, one of the most famous and acclaimed exponents of contemporary sculpture, scattered in the most evocative places of the garden, to tell the last 20 years of the artist’s work, from 1997 to the present day. With their imposing but poetic presence, the sculptures accompany the visitor on a journey of amazement and knowledge, which provides a new interpretative key not only to the sculptures themselves, but also to the space that hosts them. It is as if the unexpected plastic presences that now suddenly appear in the open spaces and meadows of the Boboli Gardens in Florence and so on – suddenly reveal the energy and the irrepressible underground force of these hills, these familiar and comforting views, ordered by architects and gardeners over the centuries. The role that Tony Cragg attaches to sculpture is precisely this: starting from an incessant and restless exploration of matter and its relationship with the environment that surrounds us, new meanings, dreams and languages emerge. From the mid–’70s through to the early-‘80s Tony Cragg presented assemblages in primary structures or as in colourful, representational reliefs on the floors and walls of gallery spaces. “Britain Seen from the North” is a signature early work, made of multi-colored scraps of various materials assembled in relief on the wall. He left Britain in 1977 and moved to Wuppertal in Germany, where he has lived and worked since, in 1978 began teaching at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf. In the early ‘80s Cragg gradually moved away from installation art and began to examine more closely the individual objects used as parts of his larger constellations. This was the beginning of his engagement and experimentation with the properties and possibilities of a wide range of more permanent materials in the form of wood, plaster, stone, fiberglass, Kevlar, stainless steel, cast iron and bronze. Throughout the ‘90s Cragg continued to develop two larger groups of work that have sustained his production up to the present: the “Early Forms” and the “Rational Beings”. The “Early Forms” series investigate the possibilities of manipulating everyday, familiar containers and the ways in which they can morph into and around one another in space. The “Rational Beings” are describable as organic looking forms often made of carbon fibre on a core of polystyrene. These sculptures derive their forms from the contours of gestural drawings, which Cragg then translates into the third dimension using thick, circular or oval discs which are superimposed, glued together and covered with a skin. The underlying structure of these sculptures gives their skin the tension of a membrane, reflecting the basic structures of many organisms, organs, plants and animals. Much of Cragg’s recent work has experimented with the manipulation of the human face, the use of stacking and layering and the effects of centring his architectural pieces, such as “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow”, around variable axes. This work is, characteristically, animated and infused with a sense of movement and pace, a fleetingness stressed by the work’s title. Whilst the piece appears to be spinning at speed, it also seems to have been subject to wind and water erosion as a result of its smooth, undulating and topographical form.
Info: Giardino di Boboli, Piazza de’ Pitti 1, Florence, Duration: 5/5-27/10/19, Days & Hours: Daily 8:15-19:30 (June-August), 8:15-18:30 (September-October), www.uffizi.it
