Gallery Bernier/Eliades in Brussels  presents SYMMETRIES, a solo exhibition by Tony Cragg. The opening will take place on Thursday, 10 September 2026, from 17:00 to 21:00.

Renowned for his visionary approach to sculpture, Tony Cragg emerged in the late 1970s with assemblages made from found materials before developing a distinctive sculptural language combining natural and synthetic elements, cumulative and sedimented forms, and a sustained investigation of intersections of body, materiality, object, and space. Working across bronze, wood, steel, and composite media, his virtuosic handling of materials in fresh ways explores the expressive potential of materiality and how form evolves through processes of tension, balance, and continuous reconfiguration.

In this exhibition, Cragg approaches symmetry not as a static principle of reflection or order, but as a generative condition within sculptural thinking, moving beyond the confines of the organic and utilitarian spheres. Symmetry appears here as something unstable, unpredictable, and active, produced through shifting relations between mass and void, repetition and deviation, structure and deformation. Rather than fixed equilibrium, the works suggest systems in constant negotiation, where balance is achieved through movement and transformation, conveying fluidity of layered shapes and intersecting axes.

The self-described radical materialist approaches form with a minimalist and almost mathematical structural logic, manipulating matter into molten-like dynamic sculptures, balancing abstraction and figuration, strength and fluidity, stillness and movement, precision and distortion. The result of the combination of rationality and dream-like thought is gravity-defying silhouettes that transcend the merely visual, inviting an exploration of the previously unimagined.

Tony Cragg (b. 1949, UK) lives and works in Wuppertal, Germany. He was a professor and the Universität der Künste Berlin (2001-2006), taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1978-2001) before serving as its Director (2009-2013), and held the Chaire de Création Artistique at the Collège de France in Paris (2013-2014). Cragg was elected a Royal Academician in 1994, represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale in 1988, and received the Turner Prize the same year. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2002, received the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture in Tokyo in 2007, was awarded the First Class Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2012, and was knighted in 2016. He is also the founder of Waldfrieden Sculpture Park in Wuppertal, where he continues to develop and exhibit new work.