Bluescape - By Tony Cragg.

Tony Cragg Bluescape (2024)

Signed and numbered by the artist.

A certificate of authenticity accompanies each print.

Prints are sold unframed.

Dimension: 50cm x 68cm 

Bluescape is the artist’s most recent print. It is an edition of 50 and has been made on the occasion of his exhibition at Castle Howard.

The work continues Cragg’s fascination with anthropomorphism and with the representation of the landscape and the human body in union. This is a characteristic feature of his column sculptures where we see profiles of human heads and eroded geological formations merging together to become one. A number of such sculptures, in polished stainless steel and wood, are presently on display at Caste Howard.

Bluescape carries a similar ambiguity. It presents a landscape of hills and clouds, which also reads as two faces, each looking up and down at the other. In keeping with this duality, Cragg has used the vertical portrait format for this landscape image, further underlining the combination of genres, and of the admixture of people and places.

The two faces might bring to mind the Rubin Vase optical illusion: a well-known double image legible as two profiles and a vase (or candlestick) simultaneously. Cragg’s image, however, introduces asymmetry: the faces do not look at each ‘eye to eye’ and the form in between the profiles might be read not as a candlestick, but as one of the artist’s oscillating column sculptures. Bluescape is an image with different aspects and directional energies - a work which viewers might turn around in their heads while looking at it.

The title has a similar ambiguity. Its blueness might be interpreted as either sky or sea, up in the air or down underwater. His own looping signature, merging with the calligraphic, linear forms of the work, is found in red in the bottom right-hand corner of the print, standing in bold contrast to the overall colour of the work.