Tony Cragg: Primary Colours

Holtermann Fine Art in collaboration with Dutko Gallery

Holtermann Fine Art and Dutko Gallery are pleased to present ‘TONY CRAGG: PRIMARY COLOURS’, an exhibition of rare coloured sculptures by Tony Cragg. The exhibition showcases a carefully curated ensemble of secondary market works that represent two radical moments in Cragg’s practice: his early plastic works and his first coloured bronze forms. ‘Primary Colours’ coincides with a major retrospective of Tony Cragg’s work at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (4 March 2017 – 3 September 2017). Holtermann Fine Art is a supporter of this show.

The striking blue, yellow and red hues of the three bronze sculptures in ‘Primary Colours’ testify to the artist’s bold approach to colour in sculpture and demonstrate his unrivalled skill in using it. These works from his important Early Forms series are among the first in which Cragg adds the new element of colour to cast bronze. Applying colours to bronze, rather than traditional patinas, is a complex technological feat that the artist achieved through borrowing techniques from the German car industry, which Cragg, who is based in Germany and intensely interested in science, adapted for his own artistic ends.

A further highlight in the show is ‘Looking at Sculpture’ (1980), a seminal plastic wall piece that Cragg considers one of the finest from the period. A representation of the artist himself looking at ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’, a 16th-century sculpture by Giambologna, the work attests to Cragg’s early use of colour. ‘Looking at Sculpture’ is assembled from bright plastic fragments collected along the banks of the Rhine. Inspired by Arte Povera, Cragg transformed this found detritus into a large, collage-like composition to be hung on a wall. For Cragg, man-made objects and materials are vital ingredients and underlying his practice is the idea that the utilitarian design of everyday objects restricts the potential inherent in any material. By using plastic objects to create new artistic forms, Cragg makes us look again at this mundane, ubiquitous and disposable material as it is appropriated into a dynamic and playful art-work.