Tony Cragg & Susana Solano: Etchings

In 1988, Tony Cragg was the sole exhibitor in the British Pavillion at the Venice Biennale, and was subsequently awarded the Turner Prize by the Tate Gallery in London. As the Turner Prize winner, he has a solo exhibition at the Tate Gallery between April and June of this year.

Sculpture by Tony Cragg is familiar to us all – most recently the large, seemingly ordinary objects – vessels, shells, laboratory equipment – made monumental by their substance and their placement. However, Cragg’s etchings , a series of 35 works completed in America last summer,have never been seen in this country before.

The Frith Street Gallery has selected a group of images from this series which relate to Cragg’s recent sculpture, most specifically the work exhibited so successfully in the last Venice Biennale. The disposable objects in these etchings – bottles, containers, glass laboratory equipment – are characteristically suffused with the power and form so evidently a preoccupation in Tony Cragg’s sculpture. The etchings make us feel again – or for the first time – the restorative power of really looking. The objects themselves become iconic in this context, utterly sufficient in themselves and only one – Container Out of Control – suggests a more sinister possibility -science, or nature, gone frantically, beautifully awry.

Similarly, Susana Solano is a Spanish artist whose installation work has been primarily concerned with an internal aura – steel structures charged with mysterious depths, transcending the reality of what is presented. The gallery will exhibit her series of etchings – Placa del Joc de la Pilota. The image throughout is an exterior space – a piazza perhaps, with tables and chairs. But the images are without spacial heirarchy – part frontal, part aerial – they manage to contradict our understanding of reality. By disorientating, they make us re-think our visual relationships, and compel us to look again.