"It takes an awfully big carrot to coax me into the countryside," said Richard Dorment in The Daily Telegraph, "but I can't recommend strongly enough a visit to see Tony Cragg's new work at Goodwood Sculpture park" The British artist's II new sculptures have been beautifully sited in an open-air "gallery" in an old chalk-pit. For Cragg, the show is a welcome outing. Now based in Germany, he was much lionised 20 years ago. In the Eighties he won the 'turner prize, represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and had a retrospective at the Hayward. But since then he has only had one major exhibition in the UK - at Tate Liverpool - and that was five years ago.
Cragg's work has changed a great deal over the years. Whereas he once made wall reliefs out of fragments of brightly coloured plastic, he now uses traditional materials, in particular bronze, stone and steel. if in some ways he is no longer as radical an artist as he once was," said Dorment, "he is now a master of his materials, an artist who can make monumental forms weighing many tons took as though they have been freed from the laws of gravity." I'm Alive, for example, is a "swirl of elongated silver" that seems to leap across the lawn like a sea serpent cresting a wave. Had it been made in any material other than reflective stainless steel, it would not have left as joyful It does." Cragg his a really miraculous talent for imbuing sculpture, which is inherently heavy and static, with a sense of movement.
When set in 26 acres of woods and wildflowers that exist for the sole purpose of making sculpture took good, works such as Declination and Point of View really rise to the occasion, said Charles Darwent in The Independent on Sunday. The former piece, a two-and-a-half metre-high swirl of yellow-painted bronze, looks as though it slumped during casting. "It exudes the air of being stuck in eternal transition like the motion photographs of Eadweard Muybridge... Where sculpture - all art - is about trying to freeze time in space, works like Declination and I'm Alive set out to show that space and time can't be frozen in sculptural form." This sense of liberty surges through the pieces, said Benjamin Secher in The Daily Telegraph. It's a magnificent show and has the potential to be Goodwood sculpture park's first blockbuster.
