NEW YORK, NY.- Mad. Sq. Art, the free, contemporary art program of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, presents a dynamic Fall exhibition featuring commissioned artworks made by internationally renowned sculptor Tony Cragg.

Cragg’s Walks of Life, which is on view from September 18, 2014 through February 8, 2015, consists of three monumental bronze sculptures positioned on three lawns in the Park.

Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Martin Friedman Senior Curator, Madison Square Park Conservancy, said, “We are delighted to present this innovative work by Tony Cragg, a virtuoso in the mastery of bronze. Cragg makes bronze an energetic, dynamic material with a fluidity that pushes the very properties of that material.”

Tony Cragg’s work supplants any longstanding art historical division between abstraction and figuration: his sculptural innovation is to fuse both styles in one work and to make bronze into a malleable material. Cragg’s sculpture is characterized by repeated facial profiles and torqueing imagery that reshapes the experienced world. These forms intermingle to create vital objects where contours shift and morph, provoking the viewer to differentiate between a work of humanism and a work of dynamism.

In an interview, the artist said: “I think that sculpture is a kind of sensitizing activity and that it has a role in being a catalyst that may lead to more sensitive thinking. It’s a materialist’s tool, which I would hope would also lead to a more open-minded approach to the world around us.”

Installed on the west gravel section of the Park, Cragg’s Caldera is a strapping, tumultuous sculpture that rests on three points. Viewers have the opportunity to walk beneath the work to experience its massive presence. At eighteen feet high, Mixed Feelings commands a northern lawn. Three times human height, the object is simultaneously immense and elegant. Points of View is a tripartite work of sinuous forms which interact with one another and with the viewer on the Park’s Oval Lawn. Facial profiles zig and zag across each column’s surface. All three sculptures in this exhibition were cast specifically for Madison Square Park.

Tony Cragg (b. 1949 in Liverpool; lives and works in Wuppertal, Germany) has shown internationally since the late 1970s. Recent solo exhibitions have been organized by the Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; and the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Cragg’s work has appeared in two Documenta exhibitions and in four iterations of the Venice Biennale. His prior outdoor work includes commissions by the Cass Sculpture Foundation, London and a permanent installation of monumental works at the Waldfrieden Sculpture Park, Wuppertal, Germany. Cragg was awarded the Turner Prize by Tate, London in 1988. He is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and a recipient of the 1st Class Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He has been honored with the Cologne Fine Art Award, Praemium Imperiale Award, and Piepenbrock Award. Cragg is the former Director of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he has taught since 1988. Cragg is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.