Test Tubes IV
1990
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
color aquatint, spitbite aquatint, and drypoint on Somerset Textured paper
Dimensions
sheet: 34 x 34.3 cm (13 3/8 x 13 1/2 in.) image: 22.9 x 22.5 cm (9 x 8 7/8 in.)
Classification
Department
CG-W
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of Kathan Brown
Accession Number
1998.40.153
Art Historical Context
**Test Tubes IV** (1990) by Tony Cragg invites visitors into the sculptor's fascination with organic forms and scientific motifs. Cragg, a prominent British artist known for his abstract sculptures that evoke natural processes and human intervention, explores test-tube imagery in this print series. Created during a period when Cragg was expanding his practice beyond three dimensions, the work reflects late 20th-century interests in biotechnology and the intersection of art and science, rendered in a square format that emphasizes symmetry and containment. Printed using sophisticated intaglio t...
About the Artist
Tony Cragg
Sir Tony Cragg (b. 1949) is a British sculptor whose career, spanning more than five decades, has traced a remarkable arc from early assemblages of found industrial materials to large-scale works of virtuosic formal invention in bronze, steel, glass, and wood. Born in Liverpool, Cragg worked as a laboratory technician for the British Rubber Producers Research Association before pursuing formal art...