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until 09.01. | #3125ARTatBerlin | Haus am Waldsee presents from 17th September 2021 the multi-disciplinary exhibition “Drawing as Continuum” by the artist Tony Cragg, curated by himself and Katja Blomberg.
The show focuses on works since the 1970s. Eleven series in eleven rooms will be on display, with early photographs, hand drawings and watercolours as well as lithographs that allow a deeper insight into Tony Cragg’s artistic and scientific thinking.
The increased turn to drawing on paper took place in the 1990s. Now Cragg uses the drawing pencil both for technical communication as a sketch or as a way of contemplating the form and content of complex artistic questions, most of which are motivated by the natural sciences. In the 2000s, he also created autonomous drawings, as well as coloured watercolours and lithographs.
Tony Cragg, Untitled, 2014, Bleistift auf Papier, 56 x 43,7 cm, Courtesy der Künstler, Foto: Michael Richter, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021
In his drawings, too, Cragg dives deep into the fields that emerge from the examination of material and form, micro- and macrostructures. He often works through themes on paper in series, as if they were series of experiments in the laboratory. In the 1990s, for example, he intensively investigates the formal sequences of vessels that nest, move freely and finally transform. Cragg continues to find new challenges and approaches for his artistic work in the current technical and scientific world. His curiosity about the smallest and largest energy fields that make up the cosmos and surround our planet or lie hidden on microscopic scales is made visible in various ways.
Laws of the digital world can be just as much the subject of his search movements in drawing as fossil finds that make far-distant lifetimes visible. In the recent past, Cragg has once again tied the idea of time and space to an anthropomorphic repertoire of forms that starts from his own body. After 2010, line-dense drawings of heads and faces emerge that seem to flow into one another in multiplied form and movement. Here, notions of mobility, automation, mirroring and liquefaction become visible, which are bound to the human.
Among the series on paper are individual sheets that reproduce insects, tools or even loaves of bread with Old Master-like precision. In addition to the abstract sheets, which often vehemently reproduce moving sequences of form and energy, Cragg seems to want to use these single sheets not only to reassure himself from time to time and with humour of his own capacity for realistic study, but also to refer to very old cultural and everyday realms. As a sculptor, Cragg’s artistic thinking is bound to material structures and spaces of the natural sciences. With the drawings, his sources can be rediscovered. The rarely exhibited works on paper reflect the ongoing curiosity that leads Tony Cragg, even after four decades of worldwide success, to continually produce surprising works of poetic power and dynamism.
Curated by: Katja Blomberg & Tony Cragg.
Exhibition dates: Friday, 17th September 2021 until Sunday, 9th January 2022
to the gallery
Exhibition Tony Cragg – Haus am Waldsee | Zeitgenössische Kunst | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
