"Rare Earth": Tony Cragg Retrospective at the Chiado Museum

A retrospective exhibition by British sculptor Tony Cragg, with more than 50 works, will open on Thursday, at 6:30 pm, at the National Museum of Contemporary Art - Museu do Chiado (MNAC-MC), extending to squares in Lisbon.

“Rare Earth" presents a significant set of around five dozen sculptures and drawings created between 1979 and 2023, in a comprehensive perspective of the diversity of the artist's work and plastic thinking.
In addition to five dozen sculptures and drawings created between 1979 and 2023 displayed at the Chiado Museum, the presence of the exhibition also extends to the public space, with four sculptures placed in Praça do Município, Praça do Comércio and around the Estação Fluvial South-Southeast, "in an unprecedented partnership" with Lisbon City Council.

Winner of the Turner Prize in 1988, Tony Cragg began exhibiting individually in 1979, and immediately began an international career, with work represented in various public spaces and international museums.
The exhibition will also feature a bilingual catalogue, with text by the curator, Emília Ferreira, and a long interview with the artist, written by the British critic and art historian, specialist in contemporary sculpture, Jon Wood.

Defining himself as a "radical materialist", Cragg has been inspired "by biology, chemistry and physics to guide his critical thinking about sculpture, rethink its role and imagine its potential today", according to a text by Wood.
Sculpture, for Cragg, "represents an active way of interrogating the world and constitutes a catalyst for increasing our sensitivity to it. For him, it is necessary not only to visualize, give form to and demonstrate complex ideas, but also to explore the material world and reveal its possibilities", says Jon Wood, about the British author's work.

For her part, curator Emília Ferreira describes Tony Cragg as "one of the most analytical, playful, persistent and innovative sculptors of the last 50 years, who understands the artistic discipline he has practiced for half a century, defining it as a rare material: the pincer of the soul with which the poet chooses the word and the sculptor analyzes, redefines and reorganizes the form and its intrinsic energy, taking himself, and taking us with him, to unsuspected places, new landscapes, populated by new beings and new ways of relating ourselves with the world around us."

Born in Liverpool in 1949, in the United Kingdom, Cragg worked for some time as a laboratory technician, before discovering the pleasure of drawing and investing in artistic training at the Royal College of Art.
He began his teaching career in 1976, at the School of Fine Arts in Metz and later, and for decades, at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, Germany, where he has lived and worked, since 1977, in the city of Wuppertal.
Open until February 25, 2024, the "Rare Earth" exhibition was organized in partnership with the Breckner Gallery and the artist's studio in Germany, according to the museum.