PRESENTATION:Antony Gormley-Body Space Time

Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galleria Continua Archive

Antony Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. The exhibition “Body Space Time” continues Gormley’s lifelong investigation of the body as place and the structuring of space. While based on the subjective experience of the artist, the works on display call on the bodies of the viewers and their movement through the gallery. The exhibition juxtaposes mass and space through the idiom of the body, beginning with “SPACE”, a grounded cloud of interconnected stainless steel spaceframes, in dialogue with “BODY”, a milled solid iron cube weighing two tonnes.  At the centre of the exhibition lies “FRAME II”, a body-space structure the size of a house, made of interconnected aluminium frames, intended to be viewed from the stalls and balcony of the old theatre now gallery space. In contrast, a bold and weighty mass of cast iron Blockworks will be held in the tight labyrinthine cellars of the 14th century townhouse. For the first time, the artist shows works both in their raw and highly finished states, as well as works that have been cast as one form, and others made of blocks that will simply be placed next to or on top of each other. As such, throughout the show there is a play between loose and fixed, open and closed, mass and space.  The raw and the cooked; the formed and the found. Iron can be found in nodules, seams, ferrous-rich ore or in meteorites that have landed on the surface of this planet after a long journey through interstellar space.  Iron is the core material of this planet. It is a material that expresses in its magnetism and gravity, qualities common to all bodies in space but in a way that is only possible with this level of mass. I wanted to celebrate all of the qualities of both construction and material identity that this extraordinarily versatile material offers. Some of these works have simply been dug from the sand and wire brushed, some have been allowed to rust, and others have been milled and ground to a high finish.  Some are cast whole, others are cast in pieces. Some pieces are precariously placed one on top of the other in unstable relations to make a single work. The idea of demonstrating these various ways of assembling and making sculpture is to engage our bodies in proprioception and an objective evocation of how our bodies relate both to the planet and the geometry of our made habitat.

Born in London to an Irish father and a German mother, Antony Gormley grew up in a large family in Dewsbury Moor, West Yorkshire. After attending Ampleforth College, a Benedictine boarding school in Yorkshire, he studied archaeology, anthropology, and art history at Trinity College, Cambridge (1968–71), and Buddhism in India and Sri Lanka (1971–74). He then returned to London, where he studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Goldsmiths College, and the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London. His first solo exhibition was held in 1981 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Many of Antony Gormley’s sculptures are based on his own body as a model. For example, his piece “Event Horizon” (2007) is composed of thirty-one casts of his body made out of cast iron and fiberglass. These were installed on top of prominent buildings along London’s South Bank, and were later installed in locations around New York City’s Madison Square in 2010. The work examines urban life in all its contradictions and invites viewers to contemplate their surrounding environment. Gormley explained to the New York Times in 2010: “You could almost say the insertion of the sculpture is like the insertion of acupuncture needles within a collective body. And seeing how the body as a whole reacts to the presence of this irritation is very much the point.” Intensely engaged with bodily sensation and memory, Antony Gormley’s sculptures inhabit a space of possibilities which is disjoined from historical and cultural specificity. Dispensing with the notion of the progression of history and the cultural superiority of the West, his work frees a dynamic, corporeal potentiality coursing within the non-idealized human body. Rather than approaching the human figure classically in the form of a representation, Antony Gormley challenges the viewer by presenting an opening of power through the suspension of moral and spatial coordinates. He calls this opening “the darkness of the body”, which is not so much a reference to evil as to a vast potentiality in the apprehension of the body’s constitution of space. The material dimension of Antony Gormley’s work manifests his concern for the elementary mortality of life and the endless cycle through which matter passes.

Photo: Antony Gormley, BORDER, 2021, Cast iron, 63,8 x 185 x 45,3 cm, 25.11 x 72.83 x 17.83 in, © Antony Gormley, Courtesy: the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photo by: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio

Info: Galleria Continua, Via del Castello 11, San Gimignano, Italy, Duration: 23/4-4/9/2022, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, www.galleriacontinua.com/