Clear Glass Stack

Since the 1980s, British sculptor Tony Cragg has maintained a consistently high profile on the international stage. Cragg's works can be divided into various loose genuses within his practice, such as stacks, heaps and piles, fragments or early forms. He explains that his glass works of the late 1990s have their "roots in a much earlier activity in my history of making. They relate obviously, physically, to sedimentary works, to the collection of objects, to assemblage, to additive sculptur,, to stacking things.... they're very much to do with things accruing, having a construction underneath the whole thing, building it up."

Clear Glass Stack is the most refined of his glass works, the one in which the idea is crystallised. It eschews the allusive connotations seen in other works of the same period and is concerned with the purity of the sculptural idea. Indeed writers have commented on Cragg's borrowings from minimalism and, as Kay Heymer explains, his pursuit of the 'sculptural idea, resembling a scientific experiment conducted until it yields no further answer to the current query". Cragg is not directive about the angle or approach that should be taken to his work, but emphasises that his work is concerned with engaging our visual rather than haptic sense. His works can be playfully humorous and he is intrigued by the visual paradoxes his works sometimes unexpectedly present.

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