TONY CRAGG
Liverpool, (United Kingdom) 1949

In 1970 he combined his studies at the Wimbledon School of Art and Design in London with learning the techniques of casting in a foundry workshop. He took part in a number of group exhibitions, presenting various assemblages influenced by Conceptual Art and Arte Povera. In 1973 he began studying at the Royal College of Art in London, where he showed work in various exhibitions. These displayed his customary techniques of treating materials: pilling up waste objects, perception of unitary forms through fragments, and hybridisation, associating manufactured objects and natural objects. Colour appeared with the use of sculptural materials in 1976, and in that year he taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Metz for several months. The following year he went to live in the German town of Wuppertal. The year 1979 was significant because he presented his first solo exhibitions in London, Berlin and Hamburg, took part in the group exhibition Europa - Kunst der 80er Jahre in Stuttgart, began to teach at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf and made his first figurative accumulations. The following year he presented them in France and Italy and was selected for the Biennale di Venezia.
After his first exhibition in New York, in 1983 he suffered a personal crisis that led him to new themes (the history of art, the home, science and biology) and techniques (stone, Cor-Ten steel), which he exhibited intensively throughout the decade. In 1985 the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels organised an exhibition that subsequently travelled to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The following year he presented an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He began working with glass, bronze and plaster, a material with which he developed a vocabulary of organic forms, to which he also alluded in the works in which he represented large containers. In 1988 he resumed teaching at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. After his first American retrospective (Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1990), he made a series of ceramic objects with which he began to experiment with large-scale work. As a result he undertook various commissions for monumental work in the nineties, while drawing has also begun to represent an important part of his output, now not simply as an aid for his sculpture.