Sharing

Tony Cragg is one of the most important sculptors of our time. He first came to international prominence in the early 1980s with a body of work that explored the sculptural possibilities of everyday objects, such as containers, bits of discarded plastic and glass, even frisbees and bricks that he pieced together into representational forms, inviting his viewers to reflect on their relationship to materials, both natural and man-made. Sharing belongs to a group of works begun in the late 1980s, in which the sculptural material functions, in his words, “as a metaphor for cell, organ, organism or body.” On one level, the sculpture is a combined representation of the faces of three members of Cragg’s team within a shared skin of perforated bronze; on another, Sharing is a figuration of the artist’s incessant interrogation of the porousness of human thought.