Tony Cragg
| Sir Tony Cragg | |
|---|---|
Mean Average, 2014, in the Remigiusplatz, Bonn, Germany
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| Born |
9 April 1949 Liverpool |
| Known for | Sculpture |
| Awards | Turner Prize (1988) |
| Website | www |
Sir Anthony Douglas Cragg, CBE, RA (born 9 April 1949) is a British sculptor.
Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool on 9 April 1949. Between 1966 and 1968 he worked as a lab technician for the National Rubber Producers' Research Association. In 1969 he enrolled in the foundation course at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He studied at Wimbledon School of Art from 1970 to 1973, and then until 1977 at the Royal College of Art. Cragg moved to Wuppertal, in North Rhine-Westphalia in western Germany in 1977, and in 1978 began teaching at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf.
Tony Cragg’s early work involved site-specific installations of found objects and discarded materials. From the mid-1970s through to the early 1980s he presented assemblages in primary structures (as in his first mature piece, the 1975 Stack) as well as in colourful, representational reliefs on the floors and walls of gallery spaces (as in Red Indian of 1982-3). Cragg constructed these early works by systematically arranging individual fragments of mixed materials, often according to their artificial colours and profiles, so as to form larger images.
Britain Seen from the North (1981) is a signature early work, made of multi-coloured scraps of various materials assembled in relief on the wall. The piece depicts the outline of the island of Great Britain, orientated sideways so that Northern Britain is positioned to the left. The island is scrutinized by a figure, representing Cragg himself, who looks at his native country from the position of an outsider. Britain Seen from the North (1981) is often interpreted as commenting on the social and economic difficulties that Britain was facing under ‘Thatcherism’, which had particular effect in the north. This work was first exhibited in the large upstairs space at the Whitechapel Art gallery in London in 1981 and is now in the Tate collection.
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