The artist sees the meaning and purpose of sculpture in the enrichment of life and in raising questions about how we deal with our planet, about the interaction between humans and nature. "It's what I dream about when I go to bed and it's what I want to do when I wake up. It's not always fun, because it can be terribly frustrating, but it's always exciting." (Tony Cragg in an interview with Sarah Crompton, quoted from: Eden Being, issue 5, May 2019, p. 16).
Cragg is a master of the artistic, ideal fusion of form and material, preferring to create his sculptures in man-made materials such as bronze, glass, plywood and stainless steel. In the artistic process of finding form, a form that does justice to the beauty and special properties of the material, numerous preparatory drawings and drafts are created: "Joining up two points on a piece of paper, there are infinite ways of doing that, [. ] infinite! So from these billions of possibilities that are there, there are a lot that don't make sense to you. The practice of an artist is to move the material around and be aware of moments in the forms that have a meaning, that either produce an idea or an emotion with oneself. [.] You just feel this is the right moment to leave it." (Tony Cragg, 2016, quoted from: "Tony Cragg - Artist", November 25, 2016, Artload, Youtube).
With "Gate" Cragg succeeds in this symbiosis of form and material. With great elegance and aesthetic perfection, he brings the material - the highly polished, reflective stainless steel - into an apparently moving form that contradicts the laws of statics and balance, which celebrates its qualities and, with an abundance of curves and bulges, opens up an infinite number of different associations to the imaginative viewer.

In the course of his artistic career, which has now lasted almost 50 years, Tony Cragg has achieved great international fame. His work is exhibited in major museums around the world, e.g. in the Musée du Louvre and in the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, in the London Royal Academy, in the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, in the Vienna Belvedere, in the Kunsthalle Bern and in the Benaki Museum in Athens. In 1988 he represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennial. Despite his great international success, the British sculptor still has a special connection to his adopted homecountry Germany. After his artistic training at the Wimbledon School of Art and at the Royal College of Art in London, Cragg was offered a position at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. To this day he lives and works in Wuppertal and on the Swedish west coast. He has held a professorship at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf and at the Berlin University of the Arts for many years and also works in the most renowned museums and institutions in Germany. In 2012, Cragg was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class, and in 2018 he was commissioned by the Art Advisory Board of the German Bundestag to realize a monumental sculpture, which finally found its place in front of the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus in Berlin in 2020. [CH]