Tony Cragg. Silicon Dioxide

About forty works, some totally unpublished, make up SILICON DIOXIDE, the new solo show by TONY CRAGG scheduled at the Murano Glass Museum (VE) from 3 December 2021 to 13 March 2022.

The painting offered by the selection of sculptures on display faithfully reproduces Cragg's artistic vision and his unique ability to communicate through glass, a material of which he has always been able to enhance the intrinsic geometries.
The exhibition traces, in fact, the most significant stages of the English artist's career, starting with the assemblages, historical large-scale works where small groups of objects are juxtaposed and superimposed.
It is from here, from his very famous accumulations, that, already in the 1980s, Cragg defined his artistic imprint, testing himself with different materials, including glass, one of the most fascinating and complex to decipher and deal with.

The artist's investigation, which stems from a need for ontological exploration of matter and the need to investigate the relationships that regulate the dynamic energy of materials, results in works that manage to balance the inner and outer balance of forms . Those by Cragg, even from a more recent era, are in fact works that reflect on the complexity of physis, reconciling the total understanding of the organic nature of reality with the acceptance of its less intelligible characteristics.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that glass becomes one of its main elements of inspiration: glass is the crucible in which the organic mechanisms and the free potential of the form that is trans-formed, that go beyond itself to become something else. And it is no coincidence, therefore, that this exhibition is called Silicon Dioxide, because it is precisely that silicon dioxide from which glass is born that contains within itself not only a necessary chemical-organic structure, but also the creative spark of ready-made material. to express itself as a new form, a new work of art.
Glass is a material and at the same time a living material, which lends itself over the years to various experiments, from those that see it interact in a never subordinate way with the landscape to those that see it as the protagonist of more intimate reflections.
In this perspective, the sculptures that Cragg begins to produce since 2009, when he begins to collaborate with Berengo Studio in Murano, take on particular importance. In a surprising evolution compared to the great assemblages of the 1990s, blown glass sculptures allowed Cragg to access a new dimension of matter. No longer bound to the traditional found shapes of bottles and other classic objects, in these more recent works he has been able to explore the possibilities of manipulating matter in the molten state. This flexibility saw him "choreograph" in the furnace elaborate and original compositions, which emerged organically, and from his mind they slipped into the hands of the masters to be molded into a new physical presence, one that resists the stasis of sculpture and arrives instead to capture the movement and energy of a single moment.

Biographical Notes: Tony Cragg