Until earlier this year, a squat sculpture nestled rather unobtrusively outside 20 Manchester Square in Marylebone, an address once made famous by the cover of a number of albums by the Beatles. The building has since been renovated into smart, slightly anonymous offices and the sculpture suited it. Few knew that it was a work by Tony Cragg, who towards the end of the 1980s was one of Britain’s best known artists, winning the Turner Prize in 1988 and representing the country at the Venice Biennale the same year. Last winter the sculpture, titled ‘Under Circumstances’, was taken away. There was no fanfare or report as to why, or where, it had gone.
It would have been easy to conclude that this was fair enough. After his high point of the late 1980s, Cragg quickly faded from the art-world stage, retreating to Germany (he moved there in the late 1970s) where he turned out disappointingly anodyne sculptures that adorned plazas and lobbies around the world without ever being particularly noticed or loved. However, this would be to ignore the way in which the British art world has come back to sculpture and assemblage, and in particular to work with poetic associations. The type of works that Cragg, when not churning out works for corporates, has been making for years.
Visitors to Cragg’s solo exhibition at the Lisson Gallery are greeted by a series of increasingly odd forms. Three rusty skeletal sculptures perch in the old gallery’s front room, flotsam from another world. The main room of that gallery has two organic-looking aluminium forms. Their peeling paint and sudden deep hollows suggest that the flesh of whatever creatures these might be has long since fallen off.
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