Artist profile: Tony Cragg

(0131 624 6200, www.nationalgalleries.org)

July 30–November 6; daily 10am-5pm; £7 (£5)

One of Britain’s foremost sculptors, Tony Cragg makes monumental sculptures cast in bronze, steel-forged or carved from stone. Metamorphic, allusive, never entirely abstract, his forms might suggest vessels from washing-up bottles to ancient pots or ever-changing human profiles. The emphasis is on the perceptive, subjective aspect of viewing. Everywhere there is the quality of surprise, the sensation one might have looking at a natural form whose deliberateness and sophistication suggest it must, yet can’t, have been created by human hand.

There are teetering stacks of cast forms that look like they have been weathered by the wind in Monument Valley, tree-carved forms whose outline seems determined by the tenacity of their rings, featherlight lumps of stone that look like sea-worn conch. And yet all suggest a guiding purpose.

“There are two interesting things that help one to get a handle on Cragg’s work,” says Patrick Elliott, curator of the major new exhibition at the National Gallery Of Modern Art. “One is that his father was an inventor/engineer working in the aircraft industry, who worked on Concorde in Bristol in the 1960s, inventing mechanical parts. The other is that Cragg himself was once a lab technician, who gradually became more interested in the drawings he was creating from the experiments than the work itself, working on, testing and developing rubber. You can see that process in his work as an artist in the way he pushes and bends materials to their limits.”

This will be Cragg’s first major museum exhibition in the UK since his 2000 Tate Liverpool exhibition, although his work has been seen as recently as last year in the commercial Litton Gallery in London. Perhaps part of the reason for this relative absence is that Liverpool-born Cragg has been based in Wuppertal, Germany, since 1977, after graduating from the Royal College Of Art. “It was only meant to be a short-term move, but he got offered a job at the [prestigious] Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, where he is now director, and stayed,” says Elliott.

Perhaps another reason however, is that Cragg’s more recent monumental work is a very long way from the amalgam sculptures he became famous for in the 1970s and 1980s, which innovatively used “junk” – although he hated the word – picked up off the streets in the creation of sculpture from plastic wall collages to hugely complex sculptures made from industrial debris.

“He was interested, like a number of his contemporaries, in using the leftovers of urban society,” says Elliott, pointing out that the SNGMA exhibition deliberately contains only five works from this period. “Plastic dolls, tennis rackets, shampoo bottles, all sorts of bits and pieces – as an indicator of man’s position in the world today. They look like art objects but were conceived as ‘anti’ statements.”

Cragg equates it to the anarchy of punk. “It was a slightly contemporary take on Richard Long, and a move away from Minimalism,” explains Elliott. “He still used the formal language of the genre, like the cube forms of Donald Judd or Sol LeWitt, but instead of making them sleek and nice, he used bits of wood, concrete, magazines and stuff he found in skips. It wasn’t ironic, but adapted to 1970s concerns.”

During the 1980s, this anarchy led to him representing the UK at the Venice Biennale, winning the Turner Prize and having a major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, something which only a few of his contemporaries achieved. Twenty years later, this major exhibition of more than 50 sculptures should reacquaint us with the artist who so skilfully creates, as Elliott delightedly puts it, “interesting forms that don’t already exist”.