Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg is one of the most important contemporary sculptors and has received numerous international awards. Most recently Cragg, who is the director of the Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie, was awarded the 2007 Praemium Imperiale of the Japanese imperial household, considered to be the ‘Nobel prize of the Arts’. His spatially extensive, non-representational sculptures are distinguished by an intensive and dynamic interplay of material, colour and form. A work such as “Early Forms”, with its twists and turns, compressions and hollows, seems like an object that is continuously developing and moving, a biomorphic construct that nature has not yet completed – but recalling nonetheless a workpiece made by man. Tony Cragg’s dynamic sculpture “Wild Relatives” is developed from the serial repetition of a human head that has been multiply distorted and seems to be developing and manifesting itself through a circular movement in space. The central creative elements of the organic and at the same time artificial-seeming works of Tony Cragg are movement, change and process. This is why his sculptures, despite being non-representational, can be read as images of life.