Lisson Gallery is honoured to present the seminal 1987 work, Riot, by British sculptor, Tony Cragg. Comprising found, discarded plastic objects, this large-scale wall relief, is readable as a response to the political and social turbulence of the1980s in Britain and is considered as one of his most acclaimed works. Despite its initial historic specificity, the work is simultaneously comprehensible as a current reflection of our own fraught context. Alongside this work are two further compositions–Policeman (1981) and Leaf (1981)–that similarly address this unrest as well as our paradoxical relationship with nature.

Assembled from a multitude of meticulously positioned plastic objects, which span the entire width of the gallery wall,Riot conveys a barricade of police officers wearing special protective gear. Following Cragg's enduring interest in the dynamic power of matter to assume form, the wall work figuratively foregrounds a scene of militarised state power, alluding to the many social upheavals that arose in reaction to the conservative Thatcherite regime in 1980s Britain.

Considering Riot's monumental scale, the work is evocative of Parthenon Friezes, playing on traditions of spatial engagement with relief composition and narrative-led portrayals of imperial warfare and societal collapse. These art historical nods simultaneously position Riot with a view towards the past while make striking connections with our present context of rising authoritarianism and police repression. An early example of the artist's studied interrogation of industrial materials, Cragg uses the vivid colours and unaltered forms of disparate plastic objects to materialise a sensorially immersive and dynamic image-sculpture.

Policeman, 1981, similarly echoes the volatile political conditions under which the work was made in its depiction of a singular police officer that towers over the viewer. Composed of a mélange of blue plastic objects, the work unpacks the colour blue and its loaded symbolic associations with two interconnected institutions of societal repression during this period, the Metropolitan Police and the Conservative Party. Leaf, 1981, underscores Cragg's interest in exploring humans' relationships with their material environments. A commentary on the rapid accumulation of man-made materials (especially plastic) in industrialised economies, Cragg substitutes pointed ecological critique with playful humour by forming a leaf–a charged symbol of organic purity–out of green plastic objects. The artist explains that his preference for man-made materials arose out of a desire to confront viewers with their overlooked yet deeply intimate quotidian relationships with such objects. The paradoxical form of Leaf further probes viewers to question what separates the natural from the unnatural.

Taken together, these three works give important historical context to an artist who has gone on to become one of the world's foremost sculptors. Though the works are reflective of the socio-political context of 1980s Britain, their poetic allusions to civil unrest and industrial pollution could not be more contemporary.

A new essay by Dr. Jon Wood, curator and art historian who has written extensively on modern and contemporary sculpture, accompanies the exhibition. Dr. Wood previously published a major essay entitled 'Strata, structures, stories:Stacking in Cragg's sculpture' in the career-spanning publication, Tony Cragg: Stacks.

About the artist

Tony Cragg is one of the world's foremost sculptors. Constantly pushing to find new relations between people and the material world, there is no limit to the materials he might use, as there are no limits to the ideas or forms he mightconceive. His early, stacked works present a taxonomical understanding of the world, and he has said that he seesmanmade objects as 'fossilised keys to a past time which is our present'. So too, the floor and wall arrangements ofobjects that he started making in the 1980s blur the line between manmade and natural landscapes: they create an outlineof something familiar, where the contributing parts relate to the whole. Cragg understands sculpture as a study of howmaterial and material forms affect and form our ideas and emotions. This is exemplified in the way in which Cragg hasworked and reworked two broad bodies of work he calls Early Forms and Rational Beings. The Early Forms explore thepossibilities of sculpturally reforming familiar objects such as containers into new and unfamiliar forms producing newemotional responses, relationships and meanings. Rational Beings examine the relationship between two apparently

different aesthetic descriptions of the world; the rational, mathematically based formal constructions that go to build upthe most complicated of organic forms that we respond to emotionally. The human figure being the prime example ofsomething that looks ultimately organic eliciting emotional responses, while being fundamentally an extremelycomplicated geometric composition of molecules, cells, organs and processes. His work does not imitate nature and whatwe look like, rather it concerns itself with why we look like we do and why we are as we are.

Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool, UK in 1949 and has lived and worked in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977. He has aBA from Wimbledon School of Art, London, UK (1973) and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, UK(1977). Among many major solo shows he has exhibited at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria (2022); La VenariaReale, Venaria, Italy (2022); HEART Museum, Herning, Denmark (2022); Museo del Vetro, Venice, Italy (2021);Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK (2021); Museum Belvédere, Heerenveen, Netherlands (2021); Museu Oscar Niemeyer,Brazil (2020); Split Kula Cultural Institution, Croatia (2019); City of Arts and Sciences, Spain (2018); Isfahan Museumof Contemporary Art, Iran (2018); Istanbul Modern, Turkey (2017); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017); the NationalMuseum of Havana, Cuba (2017); MUDAM Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2017); Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany(2017); Wroclaw Contemporary Art Museum, Wroclaw, Poland (2017); The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg,Russia (2016; Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany (2016); Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece (2015);Gothenburg International Sculpture Exhibition, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015); Heydar Aliyev Centre, Baku, Azerbaijan(2014); Musée d'art modern de Saint-Étienne, Saint-Étienne, France (2014); National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts,Taichung, Taiwan (2013); CAFA Museum in Beijing, China (2012); Musée du Louvre, Paris, France (2011); the

Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (2011); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, USA (2011); SkulpturenparkWaldfrieden, Wuppertal, Germany (2010); Tate Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2000); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, ReinaSofia, Madrid, Spain (1995), Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1991) and Tate Gallery, London,UK (1988). He represented Britain at the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988 and in the same year was awarded the TurnerPrize at the Tate Gallery, London, UK. He has been a Professor at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, Paris,France (1999-2009) and Professor at Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, Germany (2009–present). He was elected a Royal

Academician in 1994; received the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture, Tokyo, Japan (2007); was Awarded the 1st ClassOrder of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2012) and was made a Knight's Bachelor in 2016.

Press release courtesy Lisson Gallery.