Tony Cragg: Silicon Dioxide

“Silicon Dioxide” is the new solo exhibition by Tony Cragg hosted by Fondazione Berengo. The exhibition retraces the most significant stages of the English artist’s career, starting with his assemblages, historical works of large dimensions in which small groups of objects are juxtaposed and brought together.

Of particular importance within the exhibition are the series of hand-blown sculptures that Cragg began to produce in 2009, when he began collaborating with Berengo Studio in Murano. In a striking evolution from his large-scale assemblages of the 1990s, the blown glass sculptures gave Cragg access to a new dimension of the material. No longer bound to the traditional found forms of bottles and other classical objects, in these more recent works he has been able to explore the possibilities of manipulating matter in its molten state. This flexibility has seen him “choreograph” elaborate and original compositions in the furnace that have emerged organically, slipping from his mind into the hands of the glass masters to be moulded into a new physical presence, one that resists the stasis of sculpture and instead comes to capture the movement and energy of a single moment.