It's always a delight to see a carefully chosen show of works by an internationally acclaimed artist in the intimate setting of an art gallery. Prague has twice been lucky to have such a show by British-born sculptor Tony Cragg, first in 1995 at Nová síň, and now in the New Town space of gallerist Jiří Švestka. For this show, Cragg personally selected nine sculptures from the past eight years that include seven formally elegant pieces cast from bronze and two installations of glass objects whose construction is like a house of cards.

Born in 1949 in Liverpool, Cragg worked as a low-level technician in a laboratory in England before devoting himself full-time to art, and his interest in science has been an influence on his work. In 1977 he moved to the German town of Wuppertal, where he maintains a large studio and teaches at the nearby Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. He represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale in 1998, which earned him the coveted Turner Prize later that year.

Early in his career, Cragg painstakingly assembled elaborate sculptures out of found pieces of plastic and other urban refuse. The dynamic tension in structures created out of smaller pieces is a central concept in his work.

The two installations assembled from glass illustrate such dynamics. Clear Glass Stack is a tower of clear glass vessels — wineglasses, bottles, carafes, vases, beakers and jars — all crammed together like inhabitants of an overcrowded tenement in an arrangement of very carefully controlled chaos. Acting like dividers between rooms and stories of a house, broken panes of glass with menacingly jagged edges jut outward, keeping viewers at a safe distance.

Eroded Landscape from 1998 uses nearly the same material and construction, yet is quite different in tenor. The clear and green glass vessels are sandblasted, and their orderly composition and diffused light strike a metaphysical note evocative of a still life by Giorgio Morandi turned 3-D. Eroded Landscape acts as a counterpoint to the jumbled composition and scattering light of Clear Glass Stack.

Cragg's mastery in working with bronze casting allows him to create highly complicated yet unified forms with an exquisite inner tension. The bronze sculptures in the show are predominantly biomorphic, but often with hard-edged passages that suggest a synthesis of natural and man-made materials. Mental Picture from 2004 contains such edges, yet seems the closest to mimicking patterns of nature, resembling a cutaway view showing strata of sedimentary layers. The light playing off its surface sometimes gives the effect of burled wood.

Wild Relatives and Bad Guys (both from 2005) evoke physical movement and offer multiple viewpoints. As with the achievements of Futurist sculptor Umberto Boccioni or the Cubist sculptures of Czech Modernist Otto Gutfreund in the early 20th century, these works are bursting with potential energy, and have a sureness in style and structure that ranks them among contemporary classics. Wild Relatives looks from one angle like a facial profile viewed in freeze-frame motion — or by someone who has consumed far too much alcohol. Bad Guys resembles someone on his guard, rapidly turning his head from side to side.

Other sculptures take inspiration from the realm of manufacturing. Sinbad and Rod are both reminiscent of turbine engines and rely heavily on the use of negative space. As with other bronze pieces in the show, their surfaces are treated with matte paint, giving them a patina like terra cotta or cast iron.