On 28 February, as part of the educational programme connected with the exhibition “Tony Cragg. Sculptures and Drawings” two important events took place, the chief participant of which was the artist himself.
First, Tony Cragg met with members of staff involved in preparing the exhibition and the education programme directly in the halls where the display of his works was being prepared for its opening, and then in the Large Hall of the Hermitage Lecture Centre the celebrated British sculptor gave a public lecture in which he spoke in detail about his work and expressed his views on the condition of contemporary sculpture as a whole. The lecture, which drew a keen audience of around 200 people, was organized by the Department of Contemporary Art and the Hermitage’s Youth Education Centre.
Cragg began his career in the UK in the 1960s and ’70s, when the international prestige of British sculpture was very high. The great Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth were still actively working; artists of the next generation – Eduardo Paolozzi, Anthony Caro, Kenneth Armitage, Lynn Chadwick – had already become known outside the country. Tony Cragg ended up between the “Modernists” and the group of Young British Artists who in the 1980s and ’90s literally exploded the nation’s culture with freedom of expression, new ideas and radical approaches.
In analysing his own work, Tony Cragg discussed at length what the contemporary language of plastic art is and how the material influences the perception of a sculptural image. In his opinion, sculpture seems static to the viewer, but in actual fact it is full of movement. Dynamism is inherent in the form. There is always a dynamic conflict within it. Form rather than content attracts the viewer above all in sculpture, but for Tony Cragg form cannot exist without content and there is no content that does not take on corresponding form.
Besides professional issues, the lecture touched upon broad, complex artistic aspects of the evolution of 20th-century sculpture, which have revealed a completely different potential in creativity and offered such a variety of methods of working with the material that they did not even conflict with each other due to their differences. This part of the lecture unexpectedly turned into an informative and profound excursus into the history of art.
