Tony Cragg Sculpture Exhibition For London 2012 Festival

Tony Cragg

Cass Sculpture Foundation is presenting an exhibition of the seminal work of British sculptor Tony Cragg, as part of the 2012 festival. It is the first time that work will be displayed in this exciting new urban, outdoor venue, located at Exhibition Road. From 25th August, sculpture will go on show, on a rotating basis. This marks the first exhibition of sculpture sponsored by Cass Foundation, in this busy location.

The CASS Sculpture Foundation is a charitable organisation established in 1992 by Wilfred and Jeannette Cass. It is dedicated to commissioning new sculpture from emerging and established artists. The Foundation’s 26 acre grounds in Goodwood, West Sussex, are home to an ever-changing display of 80 monumental sculptures, all of which are available for sale with the proceeds going directly to artists. By combining the best of philanthropic and commercial commissioning models, CASS is able to continually commission and show new sculpture; to date the Foundation has helped produce over 400 works.

Along this newly pedestrianised section, located in a bustling area of London.The installation will run from the end of August, when the five major new Cragg outdoor sculptures will take over the concourse.  Six indoor works by Tony Cragg will also go on display at the V&A, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. Ranging up to 5.5m in scale, the works will demonstrate Cragg’s pioneering and ambitious sculptural techniques across a range of materials including bronze, stone, cast iron, steel and wood.

Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949. He worked as a laboratory technician at the Natural Rubber Producers Research Association (1966-68) before attending Gloucestershire College of Art and Design, Cheltenham College, and the Royal College of Art, London (1973-77). Cragg has lived and worked in Wuppertal, Germany, since 1977.

He has employed more materials than most, and tested them to their limits through a wide variety of means, so that he seems to be one hundred sculptors at any one time. Cragg’s contribution to the debate on contemporary sculpture practice is  considerable. Early works of the 1970s were mostly made with found objects through which Cragg questioned and tested possibilities. Later pieces demonstrated a shift of interest to surface quality and how that could be manipulated, and a play with unlikely juxtapositions of materials. Results vary from the exquisite to the grotesque, from the refined to the crude, in bronze, steel, plastic, rubber, glass, wood, plaster and more.

Tony Cragg was elected Royal Academician in 1994. His sculptures possess a strong sense of movement as though energized by physical charges or currents. They frequently begin with a drawing whose anthropomorphic shapes are then stretched and skewed along different axes when projected in three dimensions.

The exhibition is part of the London 2012 Festival, a 12 week UK-wide celebration featuring leading artists from the UK and around the world. It is developed in collaboration with the Exhibition Road Cultural Group.

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