On 1 March 2016, the exhibition “Tony Cragg. Sculpture and Drawings” opened in the General Staff. It has been prepared by the State Hermitage’s Department of Contemporary Art as part of the Hermitage 20/21 project that aims to collect, exhibit and study art of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The display presents 55 works of sculpture and drawing dating from different years: the already classic compositions Minster and Complete Omnivore, new works in glass and graphic works from the past two decades. The artist devised the exhibition project specially for the State Hermitage.
Participating in the opening ceremony were Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage; Tony Cragg, the sculptor; the exhibition curators – Dmitry Ozerkov, head of the State Hermitage’s Department of Contemporary Art, and Nadezhda Siniutina, junior researcher in the Department of Contemporary Art; Antonio Alizzi, Image & Communication Manager for Falconeri and Nadia Taiga, Project Management Director for the Fondazione Berengo.
The British sculptor Tony Cragg (born 1949) is one of the acknowledged classic figures of contemporary art. In 1977 he moved to the German city of Wuppertal, where he lives and works to this day. In 2008 a Sculpture Park of Cragg’s works was opened outside Wuppertal.
Tony Cragg started out as an artist in the 1970s on the wave of Minimalism and conceptual art. His early works were monumental compositions composed from everyday scrap. Later the artist turned to the study of the properties of form and surface, experimenting with a great variety of materials – from traditional wood, stone and metal, to others highly unexpected in sculpture: Kevlar® (a new bullet-proof material used to make Airbuses), rubber and plastic. “My initial interest in making images and objects was, and still remains, the creation of objects that don’t exist in the natural or in the functional world, which can reflect and transmit information and feelings about the world and my own existence,” Cragg stated in 1985.
In his works the artist engages in a highly complex investigation of the nature of sculpture – outside of the context of design, the visissitudes of the museum and gallery world and the art market. He is interested in sculpture beyond its serviceability, applicability or practical usefulness. The infinite logical variability of its forms is one of the many directions of his researches. This artist never ceases to delight in humanity’s ability to comprehend and contemplate on its earthly existence. Sculpture, as he understands it, is a sort of response to such contemplation.
Cragg’s drawings have a different, more ancillary status. They prepare for the birth of the sculpture, seek out supports for it, and delineate its existential justification on the formal level. The drawings are inseparable from the sculptures and in a strange way live by their plastic laws. The abstract shapes drawn here are pregnant with real-life, materializable objects.
Between 1979 and 2016 Tony Cragg has held more than 250 one-man exhibitions at leading museums and galleries in Europe, America, Asia and Australia, including the Louvre in Paris, the Tate Liverpool, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul and MACRO (the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome).
Tony Cragg has been awarded the art world’s most prestigious Turner Prize, the Alfred Toepfer Foundation’s Shakespeare Prize and a host of other prizes and awards. He is a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for services to art, a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (France), a member of the Royal Academy in London and the Berlin Akademie der Künste, and a professor of the Berlin University of the Arts.
The artist came to St Petersburg with his own team for the installation and opening of the exhibition in the Hermitage.
In the summer of 2012, as part of the Sculpture in the Courtyard programme, Tony Cragg’s work Luke was displayed in the Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace.
The curators of the exhibition Tony Cragg. Sculpture and Drawings are Dmitry Ozerkov, Candidate of Philsophical Sciences, head of the State Hermitage’s Department of Contemporary Art, and Nadezhda Siniutina, junior researcher in the Department of Contemporary Art. An illustrated scholarly catalogue has been prepared for the exhibition with text by Dmitry Ozerkov.
An extensive educational programme has been prepared to accompany the exhibition, including a lecture by Tony Cragg, master classes and round tables.
The exhibition has been organized with the participation of the Fondazione Berengo, Italy, and with the support of the Falconeri brand.
