Blood Sugar

Blood Sugar consists of five separate elements that are arranged to form a composition. This composition is not rigidly defined, and the elements may be arranged in different ways. Each element consists of an irregularly cut and acid-etched piece of sheet glass with blown and acid-etched glass objects glued onto both sides of the sheet glass. The 30 objects consist primarily of vases and goblets, but there are also a tall cup, a bowl, a pitcher, and a plate. Tony Cragg is a leading British sculptor, whose manipulation of materials—including bronze, steel, plastic, rubber, glass, wood, and plaster—into diverse forms and images offers new experiences and insights into those materials. Blood Sugar comes from an influential body of work in glass by Cragg. The form of the sculpture, with its clustered elements, reminded him of the shape of the glucose molecule, which inspired the title of the work. Throughout his career, Cragg has focused on material and on the creation of new forms. “The sculptor’s job is to make things that aren’t there,” he explains. “At the end of the 19th century, there were very few materials for making sculpture. Wood, stone, bronze. . . . After Duchamp introduced the pissoir and . . . other objects from an industrial society, suddenly the vocabulary of materials for making art was expanded. . . . [If you take an object] . . . but change the terms around it, the language associated with it . . . you effectively transform that object. . . . You make the things that do not [yet] exist.” Blood Sugar comes from the collection of the artist. For more information, see Tony Cragg and Patrick Elliott, Tony Cragg: Sculptures and Drawings, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2011; Tony Cragg and others, Tony Cragg: Second Nature, Cologne: DuMont, 2009; and idem, Tony Cragg: In and Out of Material, Cologne: Walther König, 2006.