TONY CRAGG (B. 1949)

Sinuous pours of metal cascade in Tony Cragg’s Red Figure (2009). Its meandering surface appears abstract but is in fact formed of multiple faces which have been stretched, contorted, and stacked atop one another. The effect is striking: a twisting tower of bronze caught in a powerfully dynamic vortex. Transcending material conventions has long been a central preoccupation for Cragg, whose artistic practice defies easy categorisation. As the artist has explained, ‘Making sculpture involves not only changing the form and the meaning of the material but also, oneself … the popular and unhelpfully simplifying dichotomies of form and context, ugly and beautiful, of abstract and figurative, expressive and conceptual, dissolve into a free solution, out of which a new form with a new meaning can crystallise’ (T. Cragg, In and Out of Material, Cologne 2006).

While Cragg’s earliest sculptures were composed of found objects, in the 1990s he jettisoned this approach in favour of a materials-oriented exploration. Over the subsequent two decades he has created families of work, each a meditation on a different theme. Red Figure is part of his series Rational Beings, which features distorted columnar forms to explore perception. In warping the human figure, Cragg endeavours to elicit an emotive, intuitive response. While his fluid material transformations seem to defy the laws of gravity, his art retains a tangible and corporeal presence which reinforces its ties to the physical world. For Cragg, ‘everything is material,’ and he finds himself repeatedly drawn to the ‘emotional qualities of things’ (T. Cragg interviewed by K. Kellaway, The Guardian, 5 March 2017). Such a charge suffuses Red Figure, whose organic, shifting forms seem caught in a constant act of metamorphosis.