EXHIBITION
Castle Howard’s first ever headline contemporary sculpture exhibition will show the work of artist Sir Tony Cragg against the backdrop of its beautiful gardens, landscapes, and the magnificent house
In the magnificent setting of Castle Howard, Yorkshire, the knighted British sculptor Tony Cragg is exhibiting over 30 spectacular works within the stately home and its grounds.
Tony Cragg at Castle Howard is a special collaboration bet ween the sculptor and Nicholas and Victoria Howard – the first major exhibition of contemporary sculpture to be shown at the historic estate.
For Cragg the invitation is a special one. ‘I am looking forward to it very much. Within the beautiful landscape and historical architecture of this place, bet ween nature and history, it is interesting to see where new and contemporary forms find a place and what role they might play,’ he said.
Tony Cragg was knighted in 2016 for his major contribution to British sculpture. His early works from the 1970s were created from found objects like discarded wood, plastic, tins, cardboard, as in Stack, 1975/76 (Tate, London), a vast cuboid-shape of stacked found materials, which started a series.
Cragg gained further attention with his participation in the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Exhibition of Contemporary British Sculpture, held in 1977. As the youngest exhibitor his work was displayed alongside foremost sculptors including Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. In that year he had graduated with an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in London, he began to exhibit, and moved to Wuppertal, Germany, where he continues to live.
Cragg’s work was recognised among his generation of ‘New British Sculptors’ and noted for a unique interpretation of tactile materials in a rejection of representational art forms. These sculptural elements have followed through from the 1970s to the present day. Cragg calls them his ‘thinking models’. He interprets the layering bonds of a sculpture’s external image as evolving from the dynamism of its internal structure. Fabulous creations are included in this show. Over the Earth, created in fibreglass, is shown outside for the first time. Dr Jon Wood, the exhibition curator, describes it as one of Cragg’s most striking recent sculptures. ‘It articulates the kind of dynamic and unexpected forms that we have come to associate with Cragg’s sculptural imagination, in which everything is moving, in a state of becoming, slipping bet ween one state to another. This sculpture is large: over three metres tall with a diameter of over five metres… [and] installed elevated on the historic plinth in the middle of the Ray Wood reservoir. There, it can be seen from a distance ag
