Jordan/Seydoux—Drawings & Prints is pleased to present the solo exhibition Editions from British artist Tony Cragg, featuring limited editions done within the last 30 years. The show will run from April 26th till June 29th with an opening on the 26th at 6 pm, coinciding with the first day of Gallery Weekend Berlin. For the duration of the event, the gallery will also be open extended hours between 11 am and 7 pm, from Friday the 26th till Sunday the 28th.
Primarily a sculptor, Cragg began his work during the Minimalist fervor of the 1960s. Consequently, formal and material experimentation characterize his practice with his earlier pieces consisting mostly of found objects and his later ones investigating the potentials of surfaces of various materials: bronze, wood, glass, etc. These concerns proceed into Cragg’s works on paper, where pattern and texture are drawn into focus. Through subtle distortions, as these surfaces stretch along their objects and recess into space, Cragg has found a way to highlight their nuances. For whether attached to discernable figures, ambiguous forms or approaches to abstraction, three dimensional depth and volume can be always be inferred. It is a treatment of pictorial space and surface that is handled with (and perhaps could only be handled with) a sculptor’s sensitivity.
Where Cragg’s sculpted objects play surface against surface—surfaces undulating in space, across the curves and corners of an object—his prints graft pattern onto form. But the evocation of space within the picture plane is less the focus of these pieces than it is an opportunity for surfaces to exercise. Pattern and texture move within the space of his prints and offer themselves to the viewer in the same way that material surface does in his sculpture.
Born in Liverpool in 1949, Cragg worked and trained in England before moving to Germany in 1977. He now lives and works in Wuppertal since the completion of his studies and as of 2009 serves as Director of the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. In 2006, Cragg purchased Villa Waldfrieden in Wuppertal, the 15-hectare estate of Kurt Herberts, and converted the grounds into a public sculpture garden, which alongside exhibiting his own work, features an ambitious exhibition program.
Cragg’s work has been exhibited widely, shown at institutions such as the Tate Liverpool (2000), the Cass Sculpture Foundation (2005), the Musée du Louvre in Paris (2011), and the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh (2011), among many others. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1988 when he also represented England at the Venice Biennale, as well as the 1st Prize for Sculpture at the Beijing Biennale in 2005 and the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture in 2007. He holds honorary doctorates at John Moores University in Liverpool as well as the University of Surrey, was elected into the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 2001.
