ANTHONY CRAGG

February 15- March 31, 2001

Anthony Cragg was born in 1949 in Liverpool. After two years as a lab technician he studies art at the Wimbledon School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. In 1977 he moves to Wuppertal (Germany). From 1978 he teaches at the Kunstakademie, in Dusseldorf. In 1988 he represents Britain at the Venice Biennale and wins the Turner Prize. From 1994 on he is a Royal Academician. He lives and works in Wuppertal, Germany.

Anthony Cragg redefines the reality in which we are living by using an original visual language, experimenting with dimensions and scale and employing natural or synthetic materials. From 1977-1987, his method was to select waste objects (bits or objects of plastic) and to arrange these on floors or walls to form a design or to describe a form. Since 1982 he has also been making sculpture using several processes, including the traditional ones as carving and modeling and his emphasis has been on the objects or a group of objects.

In the work of Tony Cragg the emphasis is given to materials. According to the material used, the artist explores the plastic qualities of the media he employs. With numerous, diverse works and sculptures marked by a high degree of originality, Cragg examines the relationship between man and the environment he lives in, art and non-art, artistic (i.e. sculptures) and nonartistic objects (i.e. technological, utilitarian etc). Many of his works result from the observation of objects, natural or man-made. The creation of artificial objects, which carry a meaning analogous to that of natural things, seems to be one of the artist’s main interests.

“These last years I have been working over a thematic area and set of interests which includes the ever increasing gap that exists between the visible world and the information world which is rapidly growing larger and larger. Man functions in everyday life without knowing what the objects around him are, he is hardly aware of the political situation, the social reality, the chemical problems, and even basic things like what electricity is. People are constantly talking about progress yet they seem to forget that the progress they are talking about is only material, whereas man himself, his basic condition, hardly evolves. I am looking for associations, images, and symbols which could enrich and enlarge my vocabulary of responses to the world I see and even function as thinking models”.