Collection: Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg (born 1949, Liverpool) is a British sculptor whose practice spans five decades and encompasses an exceptionally wide range of materials, processes and formal concerns. After training at Wimbledon College of Art and the Royal College of Art, Cragg moved to Düsseldorf in 1977, where he has lived and worked since. His early work assembled found and discarded objects — plastic fragments, industrial waste, everyday materials — into wall-based arrangements and floor pieces that examined the relationship between material culture and representation. From the late 1980s, his sculpture became increasingly concerned with organic and biomorphic form, developing complex volumetric shapes through processes of rotation, accumulation and transformation.

Cragg received the Turner Prize in 1988 and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in the same year. His international profile grew rapidly through the 1990s, with exhibitions at major institutions across Europe and North America. Among these was a small exhibition at Mala galerija, Ljubljana, in 1992–93, organised by Zdenka Badovinac as part of a programme that brought British sculptors — including Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon and Alison Wilding — into direct contact with an art system being reorganised after Yugoslavia.

Cragg has been the director of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and continues to exhibit internationally. His work is held in major public collections worldwide. Exhibition catalogues and printed matter produced in connection with his practice document one of the most sustained and formally inventive careers in postwar European sculpture.