Tony Cragg is a British, German-based artist whose work is firmly rooted in the sculptural medium. Drawing on both the natural world and industrial systems, through experimentation with a wide range of materials, Cragg's works are characteristic for a movement-driven sculptural language. Interested in the energy of materials and what he calls the inner form of the object, Cragg's sculptures become an ongoing negotiation between the nature of their materiality and their formal aspects.

Part of the New British Sculptural movement, the artist's early works reject the philosophy of late conceptualism and minimalism, typical of the artist's formative years. In search of a new sculptural language, Cragg's 1980s works introduce instead a search for new figuration, which gave life (among others) to a full series of architecture-inspired sculptures. Sculptures of villages, modernistic buildings, cathedrals, or churches, typical for their somewhat dystopic nature, are an attempt to reshape familiar objects into new, unfamiliar forms. - Church, 1996
is one of the rare instances for the artist to have worked with ceramic. The treatment of the material here echoes thinking based on the material's energy and the object's inner form, creating, in this case, a sense of frozen movement, a feature characteristic of most of the artist's later and most famous works. Capturing the ceramic castle in a process of progressive decomposition, the architectural structure slowly loses its form, echoing, on one hand, the moldable nature of the commencing material, while on the other hand, emphasizing the dystopic nature of the piece. Combining abstract, figurative, traditional, and modern references, - Church
is crucial in the artist's oeuvre, encompassing elements from the artist's sculptural past and the present future.