TONY CRAGG

With the artist's confirmation of authenticty.

Provenance:
- Galerie Bernier/Eliades, Athens.
- Purchased from the above by the present owner, since then private collection Switzerland.

Exhibition: Wuppertal 2016, Tony Cragg - Parts of the World Retrospektive. Von der Heydt-Museum, 19 April - 14 August, p. 320 (different cast).

“The future of sculpture has only just begun. Its potential today is greater than ever, and its possibilities are just starting to unfold. Its language and its forms have just started to develop.” Tony Cragg
Tony Cragg, born in 1949 in Liverpool, is one of the most influential and formative sculptors of our time. In his numerous teaching activities alone, and his directorship of the renowned Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, he has influenced an entire generation of sculptors. After having received numerous prizes such as the Turner Prize in 1988 and the Cologne Fine Art Prize in 2012, his participation in Documenta 7 and 8 and numerous biennales, the town of Wuppertal, where he lives, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg mounted a large retrospective of his work in 2016.

In the past five decades, Tony Cragg has created one of the most diverse sculptural oeuvres within contemporary art. His early works in the 1970s were characterised by the arrangement and presentation of found objects and everyday items, until he established his two key forms: the so-called “Early Forms”, in which the focus is on the form of a vessel, and the “Rational-Beings”, abstract sculptures, based on the idea of the spinal column, around which the sculpture is shaped. Both types dominate his work, but are then further developed by Cragg and sometimes taken to extremes. His artistic work is determined by examining and interacting with material, form, meaning and significance. This was recently asserted by Gerhard Finckh. The meaning of Cragg’s sculptures consists in shaping the material in such a way that the form celebrates both the material and its qualities – we might say ‘commemorates’ – and at the same time this awakens an insatiable curiosity as to the next aspect of the sculpture and a quiet regret over the loss of the previous view which has been lost. (quote from exh. cat.: Tony Cragg – Parts of the world. Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal, Cologne 2016, p. 308).

The present sculpture, “Conical Flask” is one of the “Early Forms”. The basic form, an Erlenmeyer flask (conical), undergoes a kind of metamorphosis in the hands of the sculptor, whereby a new autonomous form emerges. The viewer is granted an insight into both the external and internal form: by walking around the piece, they are drawn into a game of outside and inside, casing and cavity, which so fascinates Cragg.