Tony Cragg’s first artistic success came with his site-specific installations, which used arrangements of discarded or found objects. As his career progressed, he began to use bronze, wood, stone, plaster, Kevlar, stainless steel and cast iron in his creations. Tony Cragg’s worldwide reputation largely rests on a couple of ever-evolving projects. One of these is known as Early Forms. In this work, he manipulates the outer layers of containers, in order to explore the dynamics that can emerge when they are placed close together. The other project, called Rational Beings, uses sculptures based on Cragg’s drawings of gestures. The sculptures’ polystyrene cores are covered in carbon fibre, which is shaped into a 3D version of the drawing on which it is based.
Alongside these projects, Tony Cragg has exhibited numerous outdoor and indoor sculptures, on a large scale, all over Europe and the rest of the globe. Much of this work was done in glass, steel, bronze, wood, and stone. The 1992 piece called Blood Sugar, made in Germany, is now on display at New York’s Corning Museum of Glass. Born in Liverpool, England, in 1949, Tony Cragg studied at the Wimbledon School of Art, and the Royal College of Art, in London. He has lived in Wuppertal, Germany, since 1977.
