Liverpool, England, 1949

Tony Cragg’s work provides expansions in the sensory experience, both by
both form and materials used. We noticed an unusual object like Upright, from 2016, and immediately we tried to conceptualize it, bring it to language. Thus, the encounter with the work expands our capacity for thinking. It is to define this process that Tony Cragg states in several interviews that “we are what we are, we think what we think and feel what we feel in response to our experience with materials.”

The body of the sculptures always has something pleasantly familiar, even if
unrecognizable, related to biological structures such as shells, crystals and corals and, in this strange familiarity, the sculpture presents itself as close to something alive. Walking around a work by Cragg, one is in doubt about who moved, as folds and voids appear, in constant novelty. It is as if a body that did not exist before came to be in the world with its form and matter, at the same time that our sensory perception and thoughts are transformed.