ART: Tony Cragg at the Louvre

As a counterpoint to a retrospective devoted to the Austrian sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783), the Louvre plays host to a group of sculptures by leading British contemporary artist Tony Cragg, presented  in the Cour Marly and the Cour Puget, as well as  a monumental sculpture Versus, produced especially for the exhibition and displayed under the pyramid. The visual dialogue across the centuries between Tony Cragg and Messerschmidt’s “character heads” is limited to a single bronze sculpture by this major contemporary sculptor, Untitled (2010) which, like the masterspieces of his 18th-century predecessor, through its distortions and superimposed layers, depicts a particularly expressive human face, from a very specific viewpoint. The seven other sculptures selected by Cragg to inhabit the space formed by the Cour Marly and the Cour Puget are of varying dimensions, shapes and types, thus reflecting this sculptor’s broad use of materials (bronze, marble, fiberglass, wood), colors (white, red, black) and methods (circumvolutions around a central axis, displacement of oblique and overhanging elements along a lateral plane, accumulation of numerous fine layers, puncturing of surfaces).
Until 25 Apr.
Louvre, entrance through Pyramid, Cour Napoléon, 1st. M° Palais Royal. 01.40.20.50.50. www.louvre.fr/