Born in Liverpool, England, Tony Cragg became one of the leading contemporary installation* artists of the later part of the 20th century. He is known for the wide diversity and unpredictability of his materials which include glass, porcelain, rubber, tree trunks and metals--anything that is in the material world.

He first worked as a laboratory technician, and then studied at Wimbledon School of Art, and from 1973 to 1977, the Royal College of Art. He taught at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf from 1977, and has been a professor since 1988. He works and exhibits occasionally in the United States, but from 1977 has lived in Wuppertal, Germany.

In the early 1970s, he worked as a laborer in an iron foundry, but ...