Curl white (like marble) 2022

"All people were interested in natural forms. It's just a huge vocabulary of forms, and it's those forms with their different properties that have given us the basis for a language - our language and our thoughts, everything we know, everything we have in our minds, comes from the material world around us." (Tony Cragg)

Since the late 1970s, Tony Cragg has been building hybrids starting from vessels, pieces of wood, hollow forms, porcelain shards, and certain formations found in nature, such as fossils, by reassembling forms, transforming them, and combining them with others. The artist has never been interested in depicting something concrete; he wanted to invent something new that had never existed before. Nature in particular offers an extremely rich source of inspiration here. Many of the works he created, especially from the 1990s onward, feature biomorphic, biological forms and evoke vague memories of things we have encountered before. It is a game with our subconscious that the artist is playing here. Organic forms, solidified in glass and yet soft and mobile in appearance, characterize "Bye Bye (Curl)". We think of shells, snail shells, ocean waves or other swirls, which are here madly piled on top of each other, creating a coherent, exciting structure. In this particularly beautiful version, Tony Cragg covers the opaque white glass with a marble-like grain. This creates a delightful and tense contrast between the fluid forms and the brazen appearance of the stone look.

"Glass is a fluid, forms its own shapes on the surface, drops, spheres, strands. The glass forms itself in your hand - that's always a magical moment with the material." (Tony Cragg)