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