NYAB Event - Tony Cragg Exhibition

Tony Cragg Exhibition

Marian Goodman Gallery

This event has ended.

The exhibition features recent sculptures in bronze, corten steel, wood, cast iron, and stone.

Tony Cragg is one of the most distinguished contemporary sculptors working today. Cragg’s work developed within the context of diverse influences including early experiences in a scientific laboratory; English landscape and time-based art, a precursor to the presenting of found objects and fragments that characterized early performative work; and Minimalist sculpture, an antecedent to the stack, additive and accumulation works of the mid-seventies. Cragg has widened the boundaries of sculpture with a dynamic and investigative approach to materials, to images, and objects in the physical world, and an early use of found industrial objects and fragments.

The current exhibition presents recent innovations and diversifications of this visual morphology. One of the legacies of "Early Forms," how one vessel can transform into another and in its alteration reveal its interior space, is brought to life in "Cubic Early Form," 2010 and "Turning Point," 2011, as is the intricate choreography of interlocked forms and negative/positive space in "Lost in Thought," or the complex shapes cut from wood in "Chip", 2011. The motif of sequentially mutating silhouettes that have appeared in recent works are present in "Hollow Head," 2008, alongside the complex elliptical and axial stacked constructions that began with "Rational Beings." Here they extend as if to incorporate speed and rhythmic, elastic motion in "Red Figure," 2009 and "Runner," 2011; are layered and heaped in "Accurate Figure," 2011 and "Thumbs Up," 2011; or coalesce into families of striking multiple columnar forms as in "Group," 2011 and "Versus," 2011.