Anthony Cragg

Taurus (Early Forms), 1999

Tony Cragg’s sculpture Taurus is so far the most monumental sculpture from the Early Forms series, in which the sculptor addresses the evolution of vessels in terms of both form and content. The smoothly polished bronze wall, oxidized to black-blue, creates bulging shapes, dynamic coils and cavities that invite exploration, reminiscent both of mollusc shells, mature stone formations and the waves of the sea and of screws and threads, rubber tyres turned inside out and mathematical curves. Early natural primeval shapes seem to have fused with man-made technical shapes. The weight of the material and the dynamics of the powerful coils present a delightful link with the place in which they are presented, the in-line engine factory. It is certainly no coincidence that the work is faintly reminiscent of a car crankshaft. The increasing subtlety of the surface work and the complexity of the formal analogies in the Early Forms are clear indications of the process of refinement that took place between Anthony Cragg’s works of the eighties and the nineties. But the use of bronze, one of the heaviest and technically most complex of the cast materials, which is comparable with a heavy industrial production process, takes the artistic subtlety of the Early Forms back to the elemental sphere of material treatment that is fundamentally important to Anthony Cragg’s entire output as a sculptor.