Tony Cragg CBE, RA

Paris, Musée du Louvre, Tony Cragg - Figure out / Figure in, 2011

Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949 and rose to fame in the 1980s through his pioneering artistic projects, which probed the limits of materials, concepts and forms; by the end of the decade he had achieved the hat-trick of a solo show at London’s Hayward Gallery (1987), winning the Turner Prize (1988) and being selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale (1988).

At the age of seventeen, Cragg began work as a laboratory assistant at the National Rubber Producers’ Research Association, helping to test and develop different types of rubber. Cragg used sketching as a means of understanding his experiments and on leaving the lab he enrolled at a college for art and design. Cragg’s background in science has continually informed his work. His sculptures, diverse in their material and form, bear witness to a scientific curiosity that has driven him to test, trial and question.

Manipulation (its title derived from the Latin word ‘manus’ meaning hand) brings together many of the practices and preoccupations that have emerged throughout Cragg’s career. Despite the scale and complexity of many of his works, the artist continues to cast his sculpture by hand with a team of assistants. For Cragg, the human hand is ‘the most avant-garde tool’; it is the most basic and vital means of transforming things. The present work in origin depicts two hands which have then been deformed and mutated into a strange organism with tentacle-like digits. Cast in relief are letters from the Greek and Roman alphabets and symbols covering the ‘skin’, relentless and unintelligible: a vibrant mutation of order and system.