Dicey

Tony Cragg is a diverse artist who uses many interesting material within his work. Some images I find to be personally really amazing are his dice sculptures. The time, effort, and intricacy involved in making these works are astounding. I enjoyed researching and finding out more about him and learning about his technique. He is very skilled and still has more to offer.

Aside from that, these are some extremely cool sculptures!

1949

1949 is the year Anthony Cragg was born. I began to wonder what else was happening that year in the United Kingdom.

Monarch - King George VI
Prime Minister - Clement Attlee, Labour

Events:

January - A national sex survey is carried out into the sexual behaviour of 4,000 Britons. The results are considered outrageous and suppressed for over 50 years.

January 1st - Peacetime conscription in the United Kingdom is regularised under the National Service Act 1947. Men aged 18–26 in England, Scotland and Wales are obliged to serve full-time in the armed forces for 18 months.

January 4th - RMS Caronia of the Cunard Line departs Southampton for New York on her maiden voyage.

February 1st - Women's Auxiliary Air Force renamed as the Women's Royal Air Force.

March 15th - Post-War rationing of clothes ends.

March 25th - Laurence Olivier's film Hamlet becomes the first British film to win a 'Best Picture' Oscar.

March 28th - Astronomer Fred Hoyle coins the term Big Bang during a BBC Third Programme radio broadcast.

April 1st - The Marquess of Bath opens Longleat House to paying visitors, the first privately-owned stately home to be so opened.

April 4th - Britain signs the North Atlantic Treaty, creating NATO.

April 20th - Royal Navy frigate HMS Amethyst goes up the Yangtze River to evacuate British Commonwealth refugees escaping the advance of the Mao's communist forces. Under heavy fire it runs aground off Rose Island. After an aborted rescue attempt at April 26 it anchors 10 miles upstream. Negotiations with the communist forces to let the ship leave drag on for weeks.
The first Badminton Horse Trials are held at Badminton House in Gloucestershire.

April 24th - Wartime rationing of sweets and chocolate ends, but is re-instituted shortly thereafter as shortages return.

April 30th - Wolverhampton Wanderers win the FA Cup for the first time in 41 years with a 3-1 win over Leicester City at Wembley Stadium.

April- First women appointed King’s Counsel: Rose Heilbron and Helena Normanton.
Manchester Mark 1 computer operable at the University of Manchester.

May - Council for Wales and Monmouthshire, set up as a government advisory body, first meets.

May 1st - The gas industry is nationalised.

May 6th - EDSAC, the first practicable stored-program computer, runs its first program at Cambridge University.

May 10th - First self-service launderette opens, in Queensway (London).

June 8th - George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four is published.

June 7-25th - Dock strike forces the government to use troops to unload goods.

June 16th - Ealing Comedy film Whisky Galore! released.

June 21st - Ealing Comedy film Kind Hearts and Coronets released.

July 27th - Maiden flight of the British-built de Havilland Comet, the world's first passenger jet, at Hatfield, Hertfordshire.

July 31st - Captain Kerans of the HMS Amethyst decides to make a break after nightfall under heavy fire from the Chinese People's Liberation Army both sides of the Yangtze River and successfully rejoins the fleet at Woosung the next day.

August 24th - Old Trafford football stadium, home of Manchester United, is re-opened following a comprehensive rebuild due to bomb damage by the Luftwaffe eight years ago.

September 2nd - Film The Third Man, with screenplay by Graham Greene, released. The film wins 1949 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.

September 19th - The pound devalued by 30% against the United States dollar.

September 21st - The first comprehensive school in Wales is opened in Holyhead, Anglesey.

September 30th - The Berlin Airlift comes to an end, during which 17 American and 7 British planes had crashed delivering supplies to Soviet blockaded Berlin.

October 12th - John Boyd Orr, 1st Baron Boyd-Orr wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

October 26th - Ealing Comedy film Passport to Pimlico released.

November 4th - Cwmbran designated as the first New Town in Wales under powers of the New Towns Act 1946.

December 16th - Parliament Act given royal assent; cuts the House of Lords veto to one year.

December 17th - Sutton Coldfield transmitting station begins transmitting BBC Television to the English Midlands, the first broadcasts to be seen outside the London area.

Information found from:
http://history1900s.about.com/od/timelines/tp/1940timeline.htm

Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid is an architect who's work I was introduced to by a friend. Her work similarly compliments the work of Anthony Cragg, and although she isn't directly liked to Cragg through his works, her work has a similar feel to it. She uses curving lines and flowing shapes within her sculpture that allow for the idea of wonderment. This is all of my opinion but I believe a preview of her work is necessary since I don't know of many artists with the style of both Cragg and Hadid. I did some research and found her official website. It let me know about the following:

http://www.zaha-hadid.com/

Hadid was born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. She received a degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut before moving to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture inLondon.

After graduating she worked with her former teachers, Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, becoming a partner in 1977. It was with Koolhaas that she met the engineer Peter Rice who gave her support and encouragement early on, at a time when her work seemed difficult to build. In 1980 she established her own London-based practice. During the 1980s she also taught at the Architectural Association. She has also taught at prestigious institutions around the world; she held the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture, guest professorships at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, the Knowlton School of Architecture, at The Ohio State University, the Masters Studio at Columbia University, New York and the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut. In addition, she was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.She has been on the Board of Trustees ofThe Architecture Foundation. She is currently Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria.

A winner of many international competitions, theoretically influential and groundbreaking, a number of Hadid's winning designs were initially never built: notably, The Peak Club in Hong Kong (1983) and theCardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994). In 2002 Hadid won the international design competition to design Singapore's one-north masterplan. In 2005, her design won the competition for the new city casino of Basel, Switzerland. In 2004 Hadid became the first female recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Previously, she had been awarded aCBE for services to architecture. She is a member of the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In 2006, Hadid was honored with a retrospective spanning her entire work at theGuggenheim Museum in New York. In that year she also received an Honorary Degree from theAmerican University of Beirut.

Zaha Hadid's architectural design firm - Zaha Hadid Architects - is over 350 people strong, headquartered in a Victorian former school building in Clerkenwell, London.

In 2008, she ranked 69th on the Forbes list of "The World's 100 Most Powerful Women". On January 2 2009, she was the guest editor of the BBC's flagship morning radio news programme, Today.

In 2010 she was named by Time magazine as influential thinker in the 2010 TIME 100 issue. In September 2010, The British magazine New Statesman listed Zaha Hadid at number 42 in their annual survey of "The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010".

She won the Stirling Prize two years running: in 2010, for one of her most celebrated works, the Maxxiin Rome, and in 2011 for the Evelyn Grace Academy, a Z-shapes school in Brixton

Hadid is the designer of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza & Park in Seoul, South Korea, which is expected to be the centerpiece of the festivities for the city's designation as World Design Capital 2010. The complex is scheduled to be completed in 2011.

Alain Prochiantz

Another of Cragg's influences is Alain Prochiantz. He was born December 17 1948 , and is currently a researcher in neurobiology and a professor at the College de France. Alain Prochiantz is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Superieure (1969). After a thesis of science obtained in 1976 in the field of genetic translation , he turned to neurobiology , working with Jacques Glowinski and became director of research at CNRS . He obtained the direction of the Biology Department of the Ecole Normale he held until 2006 to become Chair "morphogenetic process" of the College de France in 2007. He is a member of the Academy of Sciences since November 18, 2003 and Chairman of the Research Committee of the Foundation for Medical Research (FRM). In 2011 , he received for all of its work on the Inserm Grand Prix .
It is also the author of numerous scientific articles and books on the brain is involved in staging drama of scientific with his friend Jean-François Peyret . Together, they collaborate in the writing of the play Ex vivo / in vitro created at the Hill Theater in November 2011.
Alain Prochiantz works since the early 1980s in the field of neurobiology molecular processes including morphogenesis and cell differentiation nervous. He made ​​his first important work at the College de France with Jacques Glowinski on the development and maturation in vitro of dopaminergic neurons in the midbrain , , . Who moved his laboratory to the ENS , it then focuses on the molecular signals responsible for some neuronal morphogenesis process and stresses in particular since 1991 the role of the homeobox of certain transcription factors , (but also of different proteins of the extracellular matrix such as tenascin , and glycosaminoglycans ...) in these phenomena. As was then fully accepted in the scientific community, he suggested that cascades regulating homeotic genes (the Hox family ) are potentially involved in many stages of neuronal differentiation, the growth of neurites , neuronal polarity. .. However, going against a certain amount of knowledge, even of dogma in the field of molecular biology , he reports that areas of transcription factors, or even whole proteins such as protein Hox5 can be internalized in a cell , and therefore makes the idea of the possible secretion of a transcription factor given by a nerve cell A can be internalized by a neighboring cell B and have a biological effect on it. To clearly demonstrate this, he focuses his team to the homeoprotein Engrailed of the Hox gene family involved in the morphogenesis of brain structures and demonstrates that it also has an intracellular localization in secretory vesicles . The first key publication supporting this theory is made ​​in 1998 with the demonstration in vitro that a large proportion of nuclear transcription factor Engrailed is actually secreted into the extracellular medium by Cos and recaptured by neurons in co-culture acting as potential intracellular messenger peptide . It is interesting to note that these articles have been published in good journals in biology but not prominent because the data were relatively challenged by the scientific community . These discoveries will take some time to be recognized .
Alain Prochiantz continue its work in evolutionary genetics of development and directs its research towards the physiological aspects of his discoveries including basic molecular understanding of the processes of neuronal plasticity and axon guidance .

I found this information from: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Prochiantz

Issac Newton

Issac Newton inspired my artist, Tony Cragg, who's artwork blossoms off the page.
Sir Isaac Newton, born December 25 1642, died March 20 1727, was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."
His monograph Philosophy Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution. The Principia is generally considered to be one of the most important scientific books ever written.
Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a theory of color based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colors that form the visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound.
In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of differential and integral calculus. He also demonstrated the generalized binomial theorem, developed Newton's method for approximating the roots of a function, and contributed to the study of power series.
Newton was also highly religious. He was an unorthodox Christian, and wrote more on Biblical hermeneutics and occult studies than on science and mathematics, the subjects he is mainly associated with. Newton secretly rejected Trinitarianism, fearing to be accused of refusing holy orders.

I researched this information from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

Influences

As I stated in my midterm paper, Cragg admits to be influenced by are scientists and philosophers like Isaac Newton and Alain Prochiantz. I decided some good lateral research should involve them. The posts of these will follow this one.

Tony Cragg's Interview with Jon Wood

Tony Cragg interviewed by Jon Wood:

Jon Wood met up with Tony Cragg in Sweden this summer to talk with him about the
exhibition and about some of the thinking behind his recent sculpture.

Tony Cragg: We've been planning this exhibition for about two or three years and, at
the beginning, I thought I'd do a whole show about Rational Beings. But more
recently, since the work has developed in the last eighteen months, I decided it would
be much more interesting to show the ways in which Rational Beings have been
approached via Early Forms. So that's the main function of the exhibition really for
me: to show the synthetic relationship between these bodies of work. I realised that
that would be quite a lot for one room but, it should function especially in such a
large, well-proportioned room, which gives the work a great deal of monumentality.
And so my idea was to populate this space with these sculptures.

...

John Wood: And for viewers walking around the works, looking across early work and later
work, what would you like them to take away with them?

Tony Cragg: I just want to give them an alternative: an alternative to looking at nature, and an
alternative to looking at a dull-headed industrial utilitarian reality. Every sculptor
wants to give you an alternative to looking at nature. You know nature is wonderful
and interesting, and will be the source of everything, but ultimately, as sculptors, we
have to express ourselves on our own terms

More form this extended sculpture Interview:
http://www.tony-cragg.com/texte/Tony%20Cragg%20interviewed%20by%20Jon%20Wood.pdf

Sculpture Garden

http://www.skulpturenpark-waldfrieden.de/

A sculpture garden is an outdoor garden dedicated to the presentation of sculpture, usually several permanently sited works in durable materials in landscaped surroundings.

A sculpture garden may be private, owned by a museum and accessible freely or for a fee, or public and accessible to all. Some cities own large numbers of public sculptures, some of which they may present together in city parks.

Exhibits range from individual, traditional sculptures to large site-specific installations.

Found Material

Web definitions

• (found materials) objects found in the environment and used as tools or media in making art works.

Sculpture

Definition

Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials - typically stone such as marble - or metal, glass, or wood. Softer ("plastic") materials can also be used, such as clay,textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals. The term has been extended to works including sound, text and light.

Found objects may be presented as sculptures. Materials may be worked by removal such as carving; or they may be assembled such as by welding, hardened such as by firing, or molded or cast. Surface decoration such as paint may be applied. Sculpture has been described as one of the plastic arts because it can involve the use of materials that can be moulded or modulated.

Sculpture is an important form of public art. A collection of sculpture in a garden setting may be referred to as a sculpture garden.

History: Ancient Sculpture

Sculpture has been a means of human expression since prehistoric times. The ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia produced an enormous number of sculptural masterworks, frequently monolithic, that had ritual significance beyond aesthetic considerations. The sculptors of the ancient Americas developed superb, sophisticated techniques and styles to enhance their works, which were also symbolic in nature.

Western Sculpture from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century

The freestanding and relief sculpture of the ancient Greeks developed from the rigidity of archaic forms. It became, during the classical and Hellenistic eras, the representation of the intellectual idealization of its principal subject, the human form. The concept was so magnificently realized by means of naturalistic handling as to become the inspiration for centuries of European art. Roman sculpture borrowed and copied wholesale from the Greek in style and techniques, but it made an important original contribution in its extensive art of portraiture, forsaking the Greek ideal by particularizing the individual.

In Europe the great religious architectural sculptures of the Romanesque and Gothic periods form integral parts of the church buildings, and often a single cathedral incorporates thousands of figural and narrative carvings. Outstanding among the Romanesque sculptural programs of the cathedrals and churches of Europe are those at Vézelay, Moissac, and Autun (France); Hildesheim (Germany); and Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Remarkable sculptures of the Gothic era are to be found at Chartres and Reims (France); Bamberg and Cologne (Germany). Most of this art is anonymous, but as early as the 13th cent.

The late medieval sculptors preceded a long line of famous Italian Renaissance sculptors. The center of the art was Florence, where the great masters found abundant public, ecclesiastical, and private patronage. The city was enriched by the masterpieces. The northern Renaissance also produced important masters who were well known.

In France a courtly and secular art flourished under royal patronage during the 16th and 17th cent. In Italy the essence of the high baroque was expressed in the dynamism, technical perfection, originality, and unparalleled brilliance.

Modern Sculpture

The 18th cent. modified the dramatic and grandiose style of the baroque to produce the more intimate art, and it also saw the birth of neoclassicism. This derivative style flourished well into the 19th cent. but concurrent with the neoclassicists, and then superseding them, came a long and distinguished line of French realist sculptors.

Rodin's innovations in expressive techniques helped many 20th-century sculptors to free their work from the extreme realism of the preceding period and also from the long domination of the Greek ideal. The influence of other traditions, such as those of African sculpture and Aztec sculpture (in both of which a more direct expression of materials, textures, and techniques is found), has contributed to this liberation.

Among the gifted 20th-century sculptors who have explored different and highly original applications of the art are sculptors working internationally.

An element of much modern sculpture is movement. In kinetic works the sculptures are so balanced as to move when touched by the viewer; others are driven by machine. Large moving and stationary works in metal are frequently manufactured and assembled by machinists in factories according to the sculptor's design specifications.

http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/ent/A0860991.html

Anthony Cragg Quotes

"I felt very free to use the plastic fragments I'd started using in '77 in new forms. That was almost a kind of punk gesture at the time, a little bit aimed against the pieties of Land art, Minimalism, or whatever."

"At some point we’ve got to stop asking ourselves what is the meaning of everything, maybe it’s not so very important what it means. It’s probably more important what the sense of it is.. they are two very basic and different things."
"In the '70s you could buy substantial works by extraordinary artists for a few thousand dollars. There was hardly any contemporary work that cost more than that. There were very few galleries. There were no television programs about art, nor was it covered by every newspaper. Art was not perceived in a very big public framework."


"My attitude is, I make the sculpture in the studio on my own terms on my own time, and I want to see it go out of the studio and have its own existence whether it's noticed or not."

"I think the twentieth century is just that.. the process of artists rushing through the world and finding some part of the non-art world and bringing it into the art world, minus its context."

"I always have rules about what I'm doing, and the game becomes to break the rules, but on my own terms."


"My life has been spent with this big wave of people in front of me. So at the time I was very influenced by these artists' work, but I realized I didn't want to make their work."

Some Images

Biographical Summary

“Tony Cragg seems to me one of the two best straight-up abstract sculptors now at work in the world,” wrote Peter Schjeldahl in the Village Voice in 1998. “No one in contemporary art toils harder to do more sorts of things more spectacularly with a greater range of materials and processes.”

Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool, England, in 1949. His father was an electrical engineer. He earned a BA from the Wimbledon School of Art in 1973. In 1977 he received a masters degree from London’s Royal College of Art and then moved to Wuppertal, Germany, where he continues to live. He works in a huge studio in a defunct industrial space in Wuppertal. In 1978 he began teaching at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, where he still teaches.

Cragg works in metal, glass, and plastic fabrication, as well as in traditional sculpture materials, and applies a casually exquisite draftsmanship to drawings and prints. In the late 1970s, he began making wall sculptures of assembled found objects, and has said, surprisingly, that in doing so he was thinking of van Gogh. Van Gogh, Cragg explained, wrote about going through the trash as “a fantasy journey through a land of strange forms and colors.”

In 1981 Cragg made Britain Seen from the North, a work that helped establish his reputation. In it, a collection of pieces of bright industrial debris forms the silhouette of a man looking up at the shape of Britain. Cragg participated in 1982 and 1987 in Documenta, the influential international exhibition held in Kassel, Germany. In 1988 he won the Turner Prize in Great Britain and gave the entire £10,000 prize to charity. Also in 1988 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. In 1989 he had his first solo show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, where he is still represented. Crown Point Press published editions of Cragg’s etchings in 1988 and 1990. In 1996 the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London held a retrospective of his work. In 2007 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, a major prize for outstanding achievement in the arts given by the Japan Art Association.

Cragg’s work is in the collections of museums around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Tate Collection, London; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He has produced many public art works, including a 2001 Public Art Fund commission for Central Park in New York. Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the Village Voice in 1998 that Cragg “is a ‘public artist’ in an unusually complete sense. It is all about getting art into a world that is presumed to want art. Each Cragg work confidently awaits a home in some particular room or outdoor space, to which it will impart civilized value with the spiritual equivalent of perpetual motion.”

-Kim Bennett

http://www.crownpoint.com/artists/103/biographical-summary

Kunstakademie Düsseldorf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunstakademie_D%C3%BCsseldorf

The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, formerly Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, is the Arts Academy of the city ofDüsseldorf. It is well known for having produced many famous artists, such as Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Thomas Demand, Udo Dziersk and Andreas Gursky. In the stairway of its Main-Entrance are engraved the Words: "Für unsere Studenten nur das Beste" ("For our Students only the Best").

he school was founded by Lambert Krahe in 1762 as a school of drawing. In 1773, it became the "Kurfürstlich-Pfälzische Academie der Maler, Bildhauer- und Baukunst" (Elector of Palatine's Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture). During the Napoleonic Wars, the earl's art collection was inherited by the Wittelsbach family and moved to Munich, prompting the Prussian government—who had annexed the Düsseldorf region after Napoleon had surrendered—to change it into a Royal Arts Academy in Düsseldorf, in 1819.

In the 1850s, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf became internationally renowned, with many students coming from Scandinavia, Russia and the USA to learn, amongst other things, the genre and landscape painting associated with the "Düsseldorf school".

• 1819–1824 Peter von Cornelius
• 1826–1859 Wilhelm von Schadow
• 1924–1933 Walter Kaesbach
• 1945–1946 Ewald Mataré
• 1959–1965 Hans Schwippert
• 1972–1981 Norbert Kricke
• 1988–2009 Markus Lüpertz
• Since 2009 Tony Cragg

Wimbledon School of Art

Wimbledon College of Art (formerly Wimbledon School of Art) is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London and is one of London's major art institutions. It is located in Wimbledon and Merton Park, South West London.

Wimbledon College of Art was founded in 1890 as an art class in the Rutlish School for Boys. In 1904, the school expanded, housing four rooms in theTechnical Institute situated at Gladstone Road. The Headmaster of the school, AJ Collister, also acted as joint head for Reigate and the Kingston School of Art. In 1930, Gerald Cooper was appointed as Principal when Wimbledon became independent of Reigate and Kingston. Theatre design was introduced shortly after, in 1932, by Morris Kestelman. The school moved to its present site in Merton Hall Road in 1940. The theatre design class expanded in 1948 and introduced its own theatre, adjacent from the school in 1963. The school was approved to offer diplomas in Fine Art Painting and Sculpture in 1966 and 1970 with William Brooker as the newly appointed Principal.

In 1974, undergraduate degrees were offered throughout the school, with the first postgraduate diploma being offered in 1981. The school was incorporated as an independent Higher Education institution with its degrees accredited by the University of Surrey in 1995.

The school was the first to offer artists residency, studio and exhibition space in the United Kingdom in 2000, with new studios and a lecture theatre opening in 2003. Wimbledon School of Art joined the University of the Arts London in 2006 and was renamed Wimbledon College of Art. The New Gallery and Foyer Space, together with two exhibition spaces, opened during the same year.

Wimbledon is divided into three academic schools:

• School of Foundation Studies
• School of Fine Art
• School of Theatre

Each school delivers a suite of specialist art and design courses ranging from foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate, as well as providing research supervision for students undertaking a research programme of study.

http://www.wimbledon.arts.ac.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wimbledon_School_of_Art

General Info

http://www.tony-cragg.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Cragg


http://www.skulpturenpark-waldfrieden.de/


Tony Cragg (born 9 April 1949) is a British visual artist specialized in sculpture. He is currently the director of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.


Cragg was born in Liverpool. Following a period of work as a laboratory technician he first studied art on the foundation course at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design, Cheltenham and then at the Wimbledon School of Art (1969−1973). During this period he was taught by Roger Ackling, who introduced him to the sculptors Richard Long and Bill Woodrow. He completed his studies at Royal College of Art (1973–1977), where he was a contemporary of Richard Wentworth. He left Britain in 1977 and moved to Wuppertal in Germany, where he has lived and worked since.


Many of Cragg's early works are made from found materials, discarded construction materials, and disposed household materials. This gave him a large range of mainly man-made materials and facilitated the thematic concerns that became characteristic of his work up to the present. During the 1970s he made sculptures using simple techniques such as stacking, splitting, and crushing. In 1978 he collected discarded plastic fragments and arranged them into colour categories. The first work of this kind was called 'New Stones-Newtons Tones'. Shortly after this he made works on the floor and wall reliefs, which formed images. One of these works, Britain Seen From the North (1981), features the shape of the island of Great Britain on the wall, oriented so that north is to the left. To the left of the island is the figure of a man, apparently Cragg himself, looking at the country from the position of an outsider. The whole piece is made from broken pieces of found rubbish and is often interpreted as commenting on the economic difficulties Britain was going through at that time, which had a particular effect on the north.

Terris Novalis in Consett is his only large-scale permanent public artwork in the UK. Consisting of two massively enlarged stainless steel engineering instruments, its material acknowledges the former importance of steel to the town. It was installed in 1997 on the Sea to Sea cycle route between Whitehaven and Sunderland.

Later, Cragg used more traditional materials, such as wood, bronze, and marble, often making simple forms from them, such as test tubes.

Cragg emphasizes that his sculptures are not made in factories but by himself. He likens work made by fabricators to relatives that you have never met. In a 2007 interview with Robert Ayers from ARTINFO, Cragg says about his excitement regarding his work,

“There is this idea that sculpture is static, or maybe even dead, but I feel absolutely contrary to that. I’m not a religious person—I’m an absolute materialist—and for me material is exciting and ultimately sublime. When I’m involved in making sculpture, I’m looking for a system of belief or ethics in the material. I want that material to have a dynamic, to push and move and grow.

“I also want that to happen over the course of making things, so that as soon as one generation of sculptures has gone up, another generation is coming on and things are growing up around me. That’s how it seems to work for me.”

Cragg won the Turner Prize in 1988. In 2001, he received the CBE for services to art and in 2002 the prestigious Piepenbrock Award for sculpture. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in 2007.

In September 2008, Cragg opened a sculpture park in Wuppertal, Germany.

Anthony Cragg