Tuesday 6 October 2015

Tony Cragg



Tony Cragg at the Benaki Museum, Pireos Avenue, Athens.

We had great fun at the Tony Cragg exhibition trying to locate the human profiles, the noses, mouths, chins, eye-sockets in these horizontal sculptures that resembled precariously piled stacks of spinning plates. Made using computer-aided design, these sculptures also evoke standing figures, columns, towers that spin on their axes and wobble like viscous liquid.
 
'We perceive the world through light reflected on surfaces',  Cragg says. 'We develop a frantic ability to read these surfaces and what lies behind them. And these surfaces are always the product of a function. There's a reason things look the way they do - a value to everything. But if you shift these relationships just a bit, put another emphasis on them, new meanings come out of it'.

This is exactly what Cragg is doing in his current sculptures, shifting our sense of what things should look like so that what appear to be human profiles blur out of existence as you move around them, and they slide out of alignment.




Three of the sculptures have been set up in the courtyard.

 
 


And then we walked in the gallery where the rest of the sculptures were exhibited....





Runner, 2011 (bronze)





looking closer 
 
 
 


Willow II, 2015
 
 
 
 

These sculptures are as much about the material that has been used and the way it has been used, as about form
 
 
 


Sharing, 2005, (jesmonite)
 
 
 


Woman's Head, 2007 (bronze)
 
 



Relatives, 2004, (bronze)
 
 
 


In Memory of a Second, 2002, (stone)
 
 


 
Diabas Head, 2008, (stone)
 




looking closer


 


Point of View, 2003, (stainless steel)



 
The steel has been polished so well that it does indeed look like viscous liquid
 

 
 
 

McCormack, 2007 (bronze)





looking closer


 


Declination, 2003 (bronze)
 
 






 
Bent of Mind, 2008 (wood)
 





looking closer





Secretions, 1995
 
 
 



looking closer




A Head, I Thought, 2011 (wood)





a different view





looking closer
 
 


Lost in Thought, 2011 (wood)



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