CRAGG, TONY
1949 Liverpool

Title: Identity.
Date: 2015.
Technique: Murano glass, coloured.
Measurement: 29.5 x 30 x 26 cm.
Notation: Unique.


This piece is one of a total of five colour variations.



Provenance:
- - Lisson Gallery, London (acc. to consignor)

- Private collection Hamburg (acquired from the previous owner)



- Rare glasswork made from Murano glass

- Excitingly composed, multi-layered face with a complex visual effect



Born in Liverpool, the sculptor Tony Cragg is regarded as one of the defining representatives of the New British Sculpture movement and has played a decisive role in shaping the development of contemporary sculpture since the 1980s. Following an initial scientific education, he studied art in Gloucestershire, Wimbledon and at the Royal College of Art in London. Initially inspired by Land Art, Cragg began by working with found materials, arranging them into floor and wall-based compositions. These were followed by assemblages made from industrial waste before he expanded his oeuvre to encompass a wide range of materials, including stone, wood, metal and glass.

Characteristic of his work are organically suggestive, dynamically layered forms that evoke movement and transformation. Human profiles or bodily fragments can often be discerned within the abstract volumes. Cragg’s works unite scientific thinking with artistic intuition and may be situated art historically between abstraction, an organically inflected formal language and a renewed figuration. The glass work Identity (2015) compellingly demonstrates these principles on a smaller scale. In translucent, yellowish shimmering glass, a head emerges, from which a triply displaced face projects sculpturally. The overlapping profile views create an impression of movement and temporal displacement, as though identity were manifesting itself simultaneously in multiple states. On the reverse, the characteristic bulging, softly flowing forms typical of Cragg evolve, rhythmically articulating the volume. The transparency of the material intensifies the interplay of light and depth, lending the sculpture an almost organic vitality. Identity is a characteristic example of Cragg’s engagement with perception, the body and transformation, translating his formal principles with striking clarity into the medium of glass





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#Tony Cragg #Abstraction #Germany #Post-War Art #2010s #Sculptures.







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