Tony Cragg

At 75 years old, Tony Cragg physical status not available right now. We will update Tony Cragg's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Sir Anthony Douglas Cragg (born 9 April 1949) is a British sculptor.

Early life and training

Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool. He studied art at Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology, Cheltenham, from 1968 to 1970, and exhibited at the Wimbledon School of Art, London, 1970-1973. He continued to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London, after receiving an MA in 1977.

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Career

Tony Cragg's early work involved site-specific installations of found objects and discarded materials.

He exhibited assemblages in primary buildings (as in his first mature work, the 1975 Stack) as well as in colorful, representational reliefs in gallery spaces (as in Red Indian, 1982–83). Cragg created these early works by arranging individual fragments of mixed material, often according to their artificial colors and profiles, in order to produce larger photographs.

Cragg moved to Germany in 1977 and had several solo shows, including Lisson Gallery, London (1979); Lützowstraße Berlin, Berlin (1979) and Künstlerhaus Weidenallee, Hamburg (1979). He has also participated in seminal group exhibitions, including the Silver Jubile Sculpture Exhibition, Battersea Park, London (1977); Kunst in Europa 69, 1980; Venice Biennale (1980).

He created "Britain Seen from the North," a signature early work, made of multi-colored scraps of various materials assembled in relief on the wall. The painting depicts the outline of the island of Great Britain, orientated sideways, so that Northern Britain is positioned to the left. A figure resembling Cragg himself, who appears to see his native country from the perspective of an outsider is scrutinizing the island. The essay is often regarded as reporting on the social and economic hardships faced by Britain under Thatcherism, which had a particular effect in the north. This work was first seen in the large upstairs space at the Whitechapel Art gallery in London in 1981 and is now in the Tate collection.

Cragg gradually moved away from installation art and began to investigate more closely the individual objects used as part of his larger constellations. This was the start of his involvement and experimentation with a wide variety of more permanent materials such as wood, plaster, stone, fiberglass, Kevlar, stainless steel, cast iron, and bronze. Cragg displayed at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol (1980); Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (1980); Derkhoutt-Museum, Wuppertal (1982); and the Hayward and Serpentine Galleries, London (1983). Cragg has exhibited extensively at several of the world's most prominent art galleries since then.

Cragg was named Professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1988–2001) and was awarded the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery in London in 1988.

Cragg continued to produce two main groups of work into the present: the "Early Forms" and the "Rational Beings" from the 1990s. The Early Forms collection explores the possibility of manipulating everyday, familiar containers, as well as the ways in which they can morph into and around one another in space. The sculptures derive their names and shapes from simple, tick-walled containers like chemistry tanks, plastic bottles, and mortars. These initial objects' surfaces are progressively expanded and contorted until new, sculpturally independent forms of movement emerge. The initial objects are created with new lines and contours, positive and negatively curving surfaces, protrusions, and deep recess folds, which can be obtained by manipulation processes. Containers and vessels used in metaphors for cell, organ, organism, or body. The Early Forms may be characterized as morphological or figurative morphologies that occur along a curved axis. Rational Beings are described as organic looking polystyrene with carbon fibre as the main body. These sculptures derive their shapes from gestural drawings' contours, which Cragg then converts into the third dimension by stacking thin, circular or oval discs that are superimposed (often vertically), glued together, and protected with a skin. These sculptures' underlying system gives their skin the tenacity of a membrane, reflecting the basic characteristics of many animals, organs, plants, and animals.

He exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1993) in Caserta, Italy; the "Terrae Motus" collection at the Royal Palace of Caserta (1994); MNAM, Centre Georges Pompidou, Prague (1995); and the Royal Academy, London (1999). The Shakespeare Prize (2001) and the Piepenbrock Prize for Sculptures (2002) were given to Cragg in the early 2000s. He was elected Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) (2002), Honorary Doctor of the Royal College of Art, London (2005), Professor at the Universitär College of Art, Berlin (2001–2006), and Professor of the Universitöt der Künste, Berlin (2006). Cragg appeared at Tate Gallery Liverpool, 2000; MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2003); and The Central House of Artists, Moscow (2005), among many major solo shows.

In 2011, Cragg was on view at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, and in 2012, the CAFA Museum in Beijing held an exhibition. His sculpture Accurate Figure is on display in the Nasher Sculpture Center's garden in Dallas, Texas. A rise in sculptures that can be shown outdoors; more sculptures can be seen outside; and, a renewed interest in drawing has emerged;

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