Tony Cragg: Five Bottles  
February 20 - April 21, 2006

Vivian Horan Gallery is pleased to present Five Bottles-a monumental industrial plastic work by British sculptor Tony Cragg. This work has not been shown publicly since 1982 when it was exhibited in Aspects of British Art Today at the Metropolitan Museum in Tokyo.

Five Bottles exemplifies Cragg's interest in the reinvention of forms and the relationship between the image, material, and object. It consists of many fragments of plastic urban detritus, which are positioned to form the silhouette of five individual eight-foot bottles. Like many younger artists such as Carsten Holler and Mark Dion, Cragg's work follows a scientific model of investigation, and has been described as a 'relationship of the part to the whole', an idea derived from particle physics.

In Germano Celant's 1996 monograph on the artist, he states "In [Five Bottles]. . . the bottles, as containers of fluid, imply a circulation from outside to inside and vice versa. . . The bottle, for Cragg, is therefore the allegorical place of the imagination; it holds the elixir, the potion, that makes the public fall in love and transforms the beloved. In this respect the bottle is similar to art; it leads to revelations and secret knowledge."

Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949. He attended the Wimbledon School of Art and the Royal College of Art. In 1988 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1989. He has exhibited extensively around the world including the Tate Gallery, London; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Biblioth¨¨que Nationale de France, Paris and Malmo Kunsthalle, Malmo.

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