Tony Cragg at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, Germany
—
As an exhibition venue for international art, Haus am Waldsee cultivates a special relationship with sculpture since it started exhibiting in 1946. The Berlin institution is now dedicating a large exhibition to the drawings of the internationally active and multi-award-winning sculptor Tony Cragg, which will be complemented by individual sculptures in the interior.
The exhibition Drawing as Continuum by Tony Cragg focuses on works from the 1980s to the present day. Hand drawings, watercolours lithographs and etchings are on display, allowing a deep insight into Tony Cragg‘s artistic and scientific thinking. The shift towards drawing on paper took place in the 1990s. Cragg now uses the pencil both for technical communication as a sketch and as a way of contemplating the form and content of complex questions in the realm of the invisible or digital space.
In his drawings, Cragg delves deeply into the fields that emerge from his engagement with material and form, micro- and macro-structures and their energy fields. He often playfully works through themes in series on paper, as if they were a series of experiments. In the 1990s, for example, he intensively investigates sequences of shapes of vessels that nest, move freely and finally transform as if in a cultural time-lapse. Cragg continues to find new challenges and approaches for his artistic work in current technical and scientific research. In various ways, he visualises the curiosity about the smallest and largest bioenergetic movements that make up the cosmos and surround our planet or lie hidden on microscopic scales.
Laws of the digital world can be just as much the subject of his search movements as fossil finds from ancient times. Cragg always ties the idea of time and space to an anthropomorphic repertoire of forms. He creates line-dense drawings of heads and faces that flow into each other in multiplied form. Here, ideas of mobility, automation, mirroring and liquefaction become visible, which seem bound to the human and yet could also be AI-controlled humanoids
Curated by: Katja Blomberg und Tony Cragg
Catalogue: A catalogue will be published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König alongside the exhibition in autumn 2021. Issued and introduced by Katja Blomberg with an interview by Jon Wood with Tony Cragg. 64 pages, German/English, 24 Euro.