Kids audio tour

For the past 30 years Tony Cragg has consistently produced original ideas and a remarkable diversity of forms employing a vast array of materials and techniques. It is difficult to characterise his work within a specific style or art movement. In the early 1970s a new generation of British sculptors celebrated a certain freedom from the snares of style which had bedevilled their immediate predecessors. Under the influence of conceptual art, a pluralist environment in which almost anything could happen began to flourish. Conceptual artists proclaimed the subservience of material form to content, thereby allowing any material or method to be employed in their service. Some artists took this dictum to devalue the material properties of ‘fine art’ and began privileging media associated with popular culture, including text, photography and video over more traditional materials. Cragg, by contrast, was among those who translated this freedom into an infinite possibility for systems and material processes with whic