Mountain Nature

Tony Cragg is a leading representative of New British Sculpture, which developed around the Royal College of Art in the mid-1970s. In 1979, he had his first solo show in London, and in 1981, he exhibited sculptures based on the stacking or distribution of remnants of domestic material culture in the same city. In 1988, he won the prestigious Turner Prize and represented Great Britain at the 43rd Venice Biennale.
Mountain Nature belongs to a group of works whose forms are constructed on the basis of minimalist volumes, evoking natural geological shapes. The use of pencil unifies the surfaces, which in this case include PVC pipes. Landscape was a central theme for Cragg’s generation, shared with Hamish Fulton and Richard Long. As in this piece, Cragg disrupts the dichotomy that modernity constructs between nature and culture, assuming the necessary complexity involved in abolishing that distinction.

Carmen Fernández Aparicio