TONY CRAGG (B. 1949)

A biomorphic overlap of stone protrusions, Tony Cragg’s Accurate Figure is a towering example of the artist’s ongoing experimentation with space and matter. At once geological and corporeal, the sculpture’s heaving form recalls the Futurist works of Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni who sought to arrest speed in sculpture. Whereas the Futurists were engaged with technology’s triumph over nature, however, Cragg instead is attuned to the physicality of his materials—the primordial sensations of stone. Columnar and striking, Accurate Figure is imbued with a terrestrial sense of time. Indeed, as a child, Cragg dreamt of becoming a geologist, and his sculptures suggest an almost scientific approach to materiality. While he elected to study art and not natural formations, earth’s structures, in all their elemental beauty, have long served as inspiration. ‘If science attempts to explain the physics of our reality,’ he has said, ‘it is sculpture and art in general that gives it value and meaning’ (T. Cragg, quoted in P. Elliot, Tony Cragg, Sculptures and Drawings, London 2011, p. 1). Created in 2012, Accurate Figure stems from an exciting period in Cragg's career, with solo exhibitions at institutions including the Musée du Louvre, Paris, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, for which he was awarded the Artist’s Medal of Honour. His upcoming solo presentation at the Albertina Museum in Vienna opens this July.