‘Everything is Sculptural’: Interview with Tony Cragg at Lisson Gallery, London

Exhibition views of ‘Tony Cragg’ at Lisson Gallery, London, 19 November 2025 – 31 January 2026. © Tony Cragg, Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

By GRACE PALMER November 26, 2025

“Without material, there is nothing.” These powerful words, shared by Tony Cragg during our interview, encapsulate the very essence of his sculptural process. Embracing materiality, molecular interconnectivity and sculptural motion, Tony Cragg’s solo exhibition at the Lisson Gallery, London, is a tribute to material. Centred around three significant series, Path, Incident and Stand, this exhibition showcases the rhythmic, organic and even choreographic potential of sculpture. In works like REM, Cragg’s handling of steel transgresses a legacy of sculptural formalism. Instead, Cragg grants his material agency. They adopt fluid forms that unravel, undulate and coalesce – confronting stasis through their dynamism. Yet, it is in the heart of the exhibition where Cragg's sculptural dance comes to life. Emerging from the ground, works like All Shook Up and Recall ripple and flow endlessly. As you pass through the space, their movement becomes all-encompassing. These sculptural bodies dance around each other, performing their routine. Navigating the gallery, it feels as if we, the spectators, become swept up in Cragg’s choreography. I spoke with Cragg about his fierce espousal of materialism and his rejection of 'stuff', how his course of forms has a synonymity with dance, and the congruity he recognises in our material foundations.

Tony Cragg, REM, 2025, Stainless steel, 220 x 52 x 99 cm, 86 5/8 x 20 1/2 x 39 in. © Tony Cragg, Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Photo by Michael Richter.

Palmer: This solo exhibition at the Lisson Gallery is centred around the latest additions to your Incident, Path and Stand sculptures. What is it about these series that keeps drawing you back to them? Why were these sculptures the ones you chose to return to for the Lisson exhibition?

Cragg: The point of the exhibition is that I wanted to return to this gallery, where I've exhibited since 1979, to continue a dialogue with those interested in my work. It's more or less an exhibition of the work’s development since the last exhibition, five years ago. That's where it really begins. Incident was, and is, an exciting way of working. Steel sculpture is historically quite new, as bronze has always been easy to manipulate. It's soft, with a low melting temperature. You can do a lot of stuff with it to make polymorphic forms. But steel, as the word says, is the strong one. It’s a turgid liquid when molten, with a much higher melting temperature. That’s why you don’t get people readily melting down steel. You need industrial things to do it. It's very difficult to work with, but it’s incredibly strong. So, although many of the larger classical sculptures are bronze, they're full of steel inside.

Having looked at steel sculpture for many years, I became aware of the high beams and steel plates used by sculptors. That history passes through Eduardo Chillida to Mark di Suvero, through Anthony Caro, making steel sculptures that are always very constructive. It’s usually these men, welding away, and I just thought what I wanted to do was to construct sculptures in this strong material, where you can expect more poise and position in space. By stressing the material, you could have a more organic or even lyrical quality. So Incident was fantastic because I carved them in polyurethane, a tough material that I can carve very precisely. Then, after I've carved the thing, it gets cast in steel. By doing this, it transfers that lightness of balance and poise from the soft material into the steel sculptures.

Since working on Incident, I’ve had two problems. One was, what are you using the strength for? You're using the strength to overcome gravity. That's all you're doing. It's the same with any building. So, what is sculptural? What's the next layer of meaning under that? Works like Path, or the other works in the central room, although they aren't necessarily steel, they tackle this problem: how to be more dynamic and energetic in the space. Whilst working with Incident, I have realised there are volumes of results that have to be dealt with and developed. There is more substance to them. They're not just bones, they're more muscular, more organ-like. I've been more or less working on works like Incident, Path and Stand simultaneously, exploring the substance of their materials.

Palmer: Leading on from this, in interviews, you often reference the word ‘matter’ as the Latin derivative of the word meaning ‘mother’, calling yourself a materialist working alongside matter. As much as a ‘mother’ is a nurturer, do you find that in your position as a materialist, you can nurture the material? Is your role and oeuvre a means of returning agency to these materials, which, as you have been saying, in the past have been restricted to a constructive sculptural role?

Cragg: I think that's a nice way of looking at it. When I've said I'm a materialist, it's an unpopular term. People think he's interested in ‘things’ which I'm not. I'm interested in the fact that I'm made of material, you're made of material, the room's made of material, and I don't know of anything else other than material. Even intelligence is a phenomenon of material; even love is a phenomenon of material. It's just that the result that comes out of it is that we are self-reflecting beings, which is a miracle. So I say I'm a materialist because I'm not a religious person. We are the result of all the material evolution up to today. Sitting here at this moment, we're bombarded with hundreds of colours, cells, stimuli, temperatures, things in our own bodies and outside of our bodies. We're bombarded with material things. Without the material…

Palmer: Well, there is nothing.

Cragg: There's nothing. People often ask: What's your favourite material? There is only one material. It's the human brain, because the human neuron at the centre is the most complicated structure in the universe. That material complexity is what I cherish; it's not just about stuff. Physicists like Newton used to call material “stuff”; I remember Anthony Caro calling it stuff. I'm not into stuff.

Exhibition views of ‘Tony Cragg’ at Lisson Gallery, London, 19 November 2025 – 31 January 2026. © Tony Cragg, Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

Palmer: The term ‘porosity’ is often used to describe your work, particularly those within the Incident series, as they bend and shape the air, space and viewer. For me, there’s a sort of molecular interconnectivity between the internal material components and the external environment. Do you find that allowing the material to permeate its surroundings encourages your viewers to see beyond the form and consider our shared molecular foundation?

Cragg: Absolutely. I don't want to get too chemical about it, but it is seriously the case. We have these survival mechanisms, such as seeing, hearing, and feeling, but people in front of art have completely different reactions. If you put a hundred people in front of an artwork, they’ll write totally different things. Art allows a person to discover who they are. They come to that object with their upbringing, education, sensibilities, life experiences, and even their emotional characters. Standing in front of the art, they react with that material; it's an amazing reaction that happens all the time. It's the same for me with music. It becomes sculptural because it's a material object that vibrates the air, goes into my ear and tickles my brain. But an important reaction happens between these materials that allows me to enjoy the music.

When people say material is basic, that's totally wrong to me. It is the essence of everything, not just looking at art, but our whole way of dealing with the material around us. Understanding materials teaches us how to deal with the earth, our social structures, our educational structures, and the relationships between countries and societies. If you're trying to solve any problem on a religious or ideological basis alone, then you're in trouble. You can only do it on a super materialistic level, because suddenly there's an enormous parity in everything, and you realise we all have an equal share in this.

Palmer: Just like the way that you're discussing how music is sculptural, I have found that dance and performance art lend themselves to a sculptural lens. I mention this, noting that your exhibition space, Waldfrieden Sculpture Park, was the location for Wim Wenders' documentary film for Pina Bausch. When you are constructing these sculptures, is there a certain rhythm or cadence you are drawing upon? In refuting traditional sculptural ideas of stasis and fixity, do you intend for your sculptures to dance, to escape their rooted locations? Do the likes of Bausch, Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti ever influence your sculptural designs, or is the rhythm and bodily motion inherent within yourself and the material?

Cragg: Absolutely. If you know dance, you know that these people are amazingly tough. To hold the position and do what they do, they have to be incredibly strong; they're just made of sinew and muscle. So very durable material provides an enormous correlation with dance.

But my dance is much less expressive. If I stick my tongue out at you, then it's 5 grams of material, a tiny little thing. Something happens to your brain where you suddenly think, God, he's a weirdo, sticking his tongue out that way. Every tiny change in form means a change in your mind and emotions. That's exactly what's happening when I'm making my sculptures. As I change the form, my brain is thinking something different, and getting different excitements about it, and disappointments in some cases. So emotionally and intellectually, one is constantly at one with the material. Everything is sculptural for me, because sculptural means it's material that you react with. It's not just about cutting things out of shapes.

Palmer: Drawing on these ideas of dance and performance, I am curious about your use of repeated patterns, particularly within works like Incident (Vertical) and REM. Ideas of repetition in motion remind me of choreographic processes; I am particularly thinking of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A and Pina Bausch. Is there a deliberateness to these patterns when you are constructing your sculptures? You have termed yourself a materialist, but would you also consider yourself a choreographer?

Cragg: Pina Bausch was a fantastic artist, so I don't think I could come from Wuppertal and call myself a choreographer. I'm gonna stick with sculptor. But it raises the question of what choreography actually means. It's to do with the run of things. It's to do with the course of forms. I'm dealing with very resistant, bloody-minded materials, which have to be beaten in at every stage, to get this sense of softness. Perhaps that is my course of forms.

Tony Cragg, Incident (Vertical), 2022, Corten Steel, 230 x 84 x 94 cm, 90 1/2 x 33 1/8 x 37 in. © Tony Cragg, Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Photo by Michael Richter.

Palmer: As a series, undoubtedly, your sculptures communicate and correspond with one another. I wonder if, as well, they are forming a part of a routine, each player a moving part, each with its own section of choreography, establishing a performance as they move and dance with and around each other? As viewers, by being within the space of these sculptures, are we also a part of the performance?

Cragg: I think very much so, especially when it comes to installing. In my generation, during the ‘70s and ‘80s, installations were one of the trending things. I had an enormous amount of experience working into a space. But then you begin to see bodies in space, and you start to understand the relationship between the sculptures and the audience. Now, my assistants come and unpack my work, and then when everything's on wheels, I come in and begin to arrange them. It doesn't matter what you're doing; if you don't have a natural sense of it, then life gets tough. You have to have a sense of balance, poise, composition, and size. It all has to work together. With every exhibition I've done, I suppose there has to be a kind of choreography. If you can't choreograph it in some way, from one room to the other, it won't work.

When you walk through a museum, it’s almost scenic. In one room, you get one sense of motion, and then you get to another room, and it's a different kind of movement altogether. I used to make work like this, moving around, being amongst people. There’s a work called On the Hill, which was my early engagement with ‘performance’, placing my body in a space and exploring motion.

Palmer: For me, there is definitely a choreography, especially with this exhibition. It feels like sequences in the way that it has been curated; you move from each space, and there’s a different rhythm being expressed, a different cadence.

My final question: you are often credited as a sculptor who ‘constantly pushes the limits of what is possible within sculpture.’ What are those limits that you are pushing against? Is there more that you wish to achieve within your sculptural practice that you have yet to do?

Cragg: If you consider this: in a 10-kilogram block of clay, there are billions of forms. As a sculptor, when you’re working with the material, eventually your mind and emotions are more engaged. Obviously, if you want to be diverted and make a horse out of the clay, then all of your thoughts and emotions go to ‘horse’. But as long as you're looking for new things, things you've never seen before, then there are innumerable possibilities to discover. Sculpture is an investigation of the material world. It's not even me trying to push the barriers of sculpture. All I'm trying to do is look into the material myself. I don't have ideas; good ideas invariably make very bad art. I don't really want to be stuck on an ‘idea’. It's the investigation, it's looking for stuff, and now and then finding it. The point is, it's only just starting.

When you look at all the possibilities of material, then I don't see what would ever stop. My parents died in 1980. They never saw an iPhone. They didn't know about computers. They didn't know about the medicine of today. They didn't know about the knowledge we have about the universe and the space around them. There was no idea of these things at that time. We're just looking at the world as it moves along. We’re experiencing the kaleidoscope of life. And in another 50 years, God knows what.

My thanks go to Tony Cragg for his insightful discussion and for taking the time to reflect on his current exhibition. I would also like to share my appreciation for the Lisson Gallery and Pelham Communications for making this all possible.

‘Tony Cragg’  runs between November 19, 2025, and January 31, 2026, at the Lisson Gallery, London. WM