From 23 May onwards, Anthony Cragg will exhibit large sculptures in the roof garden of the Art and Exhibition Hall. This show sums up thirty years of his activity as a sculptor and expressly reaffirms Cragg's standing. His sculptural work is very diverse and can be restricted neither to a "signature material" nor to a "signature style". The continuity and validity of his work is based on fundamental questions connected to the relationship between body, material and object, issues with which Anthony Cragg has been concerning himself continuously for years. His sculptures are fascinating through their accessibility and aliveness " they are never static. They are accessible at first glance because they operate with familiar shapes and objects. But they never transmit just one perspective or a singly valid picture but in the process of looking at them they grow into complex phenomena which affect different levels of our understanding in their effect. Just as faces materialise and disappear again in the perceptual process in his most recent pillars from the series Rational Beings, so in Early Forms shapes of vessels appear which were set into a motion which makes them change form or disappear completely. Surfaces perform an ambivalent function in Cragg " they can dissolve the material nature of a sculpture as easily as they can strengthen it. As a consequence, his sculptures change between illusion and concrete reality. Nothing is safe. The essence of Anthony Cragg's sculptures is change. Creation and perception are like processes and as such they are living events. For that reason, above all, Anthony Cragg's sculptures are "Signs of Life".
Such aliveness of Cragg's sculptures can be immediately experienced by the observer. By working with images, a relationship is established with the observer which is mostly absent in non-representational sculptures, something which has allowed many abstract sculptures in public spaces to degenerate into mere city furniture. Cragg's sculptures relate directly to human experience in which everyone can participate and which it is fun to recognise. They leave no one untouched.
The sculptures of Anthony Cragg are naturally approachable in a way which makes it surprising that this solution has not been found before. For all its complexity, the effect of a sculpture by Anthony Cragg is in the first instance very direct " it can make itself accessible by means of a familiar, attractive material as much as by a known image or motif which comes to expression in the sculpture as something seen in a new and altered way. The precision of his sculptures is evident in their comprehensible construction " the observer can see how a sculpture was assembled in layers of collected material, how an image can appear or disappear in the sculpture. He can find a direct relationship to the scale of the sculpture, experience reductions or enlargements and place himself in relation to the sculpture. The twenty large sculptures in the roof garden of the Art and Exhibition Hall illustrate the complete diversity of Cragg's sculptural work.
The show in the roof garden is supplemented by a selection of paper works and small-scale sculptures in the central room of the Art and Exhibition Hall, providing an insight into the creative process underlying Anthony Cragg's work.
In parallel to the exhibition, the Richter Verlag Düsseldorf is publishing a comprehensive monograph with approx. 500 illustrations and numerous essays since 1981, which in eight sections compellingly documents the work of the artist and his development.
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