Skulpturenpark Köln

The work of Tony Cragg (b. 1949 in Liverpool), member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and the Royal Academy in London, is characterised by an intensive, dynamic interaction between material, surface and form. What emerges are abstract sculptures whose seemingly cool construction finds the models for its ideal-typical fundamental forms and dynamic energies in nature. Titles like The Articulated Column and Early Forms evoke evolutionary processes and create connections with humans that are mostly lacking in abstract sculpture. Cragg's work always offers us intuitive access, a sign of the artist's endeavour to create art which, in a complex technical and artificial environment, "expresses human thinking and feeling through all inanimate materials".

Tony Cragg studied at the Royal College of Art in London. Since the 1980s he has been represented on the international scene, e.g. at the Venice Biennale in 1980 and 1988 or documenta in Kassel in 1982, and he has held guest lectureships and professorships in Düsseldorf, Berlin, London and elsewhere. Although his sculptures are to be described as non-figurative, they are nonetheless "signs of life". Movement, change and transition can be seen to be central elements in the shaping of forms that often seem biomorphic. Thus for example the Early Forms for all their abstractness, seem like organic structures incompletely formed by nature and still in a process of metamorphosis.