Tony Cragg at the Louvre

Maybach‘s commitment to promote contemporary art has been one of the brand‘s distinctive signs over the past five years. Since 2011, Maybach is proud to support the most famous and visited museum in the world, the Louvre in Paris, being the first car brand in the world to take on this role.
The three-year cooperation was inaugurated by the British sculptor Tony Cragg. This was a particular honour for him as he was afforded this extraordinary opportunity to be the first artist to exhibit his work under I.M. Pei’s world-famous glass pyramid since its construction in 1989.

For this first collaboration, Tony Cragg presented one of his latest sculpture, “Versus”, under the glass pyramid. This monumental sculpture was created especially for this exhibition at the Louvre;
in addition seven other sculptures were exhibited in the Cour Marly and in the Cour Puget.
Tony Cragg‘s sculpture - “Versus” - will be displayed until April 25, 2011, while the “Versus” sculpture will be displayed until October 2011. Maybach is the main sponsor for both the exhibition and the installation beneath I.M. Pei’s pyramid.

Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949. He worked as a laboratory technician at the Natural Rubber Producers Research Association in the late ‘60s, before attending Gloucestershire College of Art and Design, Cheltenham College and the Royal College of Art, in London, in 1977. After that, he has lived nearly half his life in Germany, with his home and studio in Wuppertal. Tony Cragg was awarded the Turner Prize in 1988 and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1994. Since 2009, he has been Principal of the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Actually, he is one of the most acclaimed English and international artists, developing various and intriguing possibilities in the making of sculpture. His contribution to the debate on contemporary sculpture practice is considerable and constantly updated.
His sculptures can largely be organised into groups according to the different materials from which they are made: stone, clay, bronze, steel, glass, or different synthetic materials like polystyrene, carbon- or glass-fibre.
They are a limitless source of inspiration demonstrating the artist’s interest to surface quality and how that could be manipulated, and depict a play with unlikely juxtapositions of materials.

Tony Cragg’s sensitivity to different materials is and has been the starting point for his work. Every material gives different emotional experiences, both for the artist and for the observers. Cragg points out that the words material and materia originate from the Latin word mater mother. Like a mother, the material gives birth to the thought, the different properties of a material give rise to the idea, which produces the form.

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