From the beginning of his career, exploring the material world and its almost infinite artistic potential has been central to Tony Cragg's work. His creations result from a nearly obsessive examination of the material itself. “There is nothing but material,” says Cragg [quoted from: Westdeutsche Zeitung online, April 3, 2019] and describes himself as a “radical materialist” [quoted from: Thaddaeus Ropac, https://ropac.net/news/563-tony-cragg/]. In the course of a five-decade career, he has used a wide variety of materials, most of them man-made, including plastic, fiberglass, plaster, stainless steel, as well as consumer goods, but also bronze, granite, wood, and, as in the monumental work "Chain of Events" offered here, plywood."The reason I am so interested in plywood is that it’s a man-made material. Man-made materials are always inferior, so I try to give them another value, another quality." (https://artflyer.net/tony-cragg/)


Through an intensive examination of materials—quality, surface texture, and shape— a quest for the perfect shape, the artist reveals his background in natural science and his interest in chemistry, physics, genetics, and engineering. He worked as a chemical laboratory technician for two years before studying art. Accordingly, nature remains the most important source of inspiration for his distinctive structures, especially the relationship and interplay between man and nature.
In the 1990s, his sculptures grew to monumental proportions, taking up more space. The artist began creating slender, column-like sculptures that reach for the sky, works that rank among his most sought-after pieces. Like the work offered here, “Chain of Events,” they resemble amorphous abstract forms that evoke organic growth, proliferating mushrooms, or backbones. Yet, they have a particular notion of concreteness that allows for a wide range of associations.
Many stacked, smoothly polished layers of wood in different colors are arranged to create curves, arches, and bulges, with the two intertwining structures rising like a climbing plant to form a perfect symbiosis of form and material. The result is a dynamic structure that defies the law of statics and balance, seemingly losing all sense of gravity and contradicting the laws of physics. The work evokes a sense of movement and inherent vitality, underscored by the title “Chain of Events” and the possible reference to evolution as a constant change and a successive 'chain of events'.


British-born artist Tony Cragg, who has lived in Germany since 1977, has left his mark on international contemporary sculpture since the 1980s. He exhibited at Documenta 7 and 8 in Kassel in 1982 and 1987, respectively, and represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale in 1988, the same year he won the prestigious Turner Prize.
His passion for the material was the subject of last year's much-discussed exhibition “Tony Cragg. Please Touch!” at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, in which visitors were encouraged to touch the fascinating works. Other significant exhibitions have recently been shown at, among others, the Musée du Louvre and the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, the Belvedere in Vienna, the Kunsthalle Bern, and the Benaki Museum in Athens. [CH]