Tony Cragg valuation
Sorted street plastic by colour into pictures, then spent forty years turning solid material as though it had grown.
Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949 and worked as a laboratory technician at a rubber research laboratory before art school at Wimbledon and the Royal College.
What a work by Tony Cragg is worth
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Bio
Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949 and worked as a laboratory technician at a rubber research laboratory before art school at Wimbledon and the Royal College. The work that made his name in the late 1970s was assembled from plastic refuse picked up off the street and sorted by colour into silhouettes laid out on a wall or a floor. He moved to Wuppertal in 1977 and has been based in Germany since, winning the Turner Prize in 1988, representing Britain at the Venice Biennale the same year, and later teaching at and then running the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He opened the Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden in 2008. The later sculpture — the Early Forms and the Rational Beings — is turned, stacked and twisted in bronze, steel, wood, glass and fibreglass, with profiles that suggest growth or fluid motion in materials that have neither.
Bronzes are normally editioned in small numbers with artist's proofs, and edition size, foundry and patina all belong in the record: two casts of one form can differ markedly in patina, and a cast that has stood outdoors will have weathered. Unique works in wood, glass and stone come up as well, and glass travels badly. There are drawings, watercolours and prints beneath them. The studio in Wuppertal keeps the records against which a work's details are confirmed.
At a glance
- Born
- 1949, Liverpool
- Movements
- Abstract art, Contemporary art
Cheltenham, Lisson and Britain Seen from the North
Cragg studied at Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology in Cheltenham from 1968 to 1970 before Wimbledon and the Royal College. After moving to Wuppertal he had solo shows at the Lisson Gallery in London and in Berlin and Hamburg in 1979. Stack, of 1975, is his first mature piece, and Britain Seen from the North, of 1981, set the outline of Great Britain on its side in coloured scraps.
He was professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1988 to 2001, showed again at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and at the Royal Academy in 1999, and in 2011 exhibited at the Louvre and the Scottish National Gallery. He has been knighted. The Cragg Foundation, set up by the family in 2005, runs Waldfrieden.
New Stones, Extrusion and the public sculpture
Cragg, the son of an aeronautical engineer, was influenced as a student by Richard Long, and in 1976 taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Metz. After two years working in isolation in Wuppertal he returned in 1979 with New Stones, Newton's Tones, a floor of plastic fragments sorted by colour, and in the 1980s showed at Documenta 7 and 8. He received the Praemium Imperiale in 2007, was rector of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2009 to 2013, succeeding Markus Lüpertz, and took German citizenship after Brexit.
For the Bonner Kunstverein in 1990 he made Extrusion, an edition of thirty white plaster sculptures, each worked individually after casting and signed and numbered. His public sculptures include Mean Average, six metres of bronze unveiled in Bonn in 2014, and a six-metre work for the Bundestag's Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus in Berlin, completed in 2020. Waldfrieden occupies fifteen hectares around the former villa of the industrialist Kurt Herberts, which he bought in 2006.
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