ART CITIES: London-Antony Gormley
Antony Gormley is 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: White Cube Gallery Archive
In a career spanning nearly 40 years, Antony Gormley has made sculpture that explores the relation of the human body to space at large, explicitly in large-scale installations. Almost all of his work takes the human body as its subject, with his own body used in many works as the basis for metal casts. By using his own existence as a test ground, Gormley’s work transforms a site of subjective experience into one of collective projection. “I am interested in the body”, he says, “because it is the place where emotions are most directly registered. When you feel frightened, when you feel excited, happy, depressed somehow the body registers it.” Antony Gormley was born in 1950 in London, where he lives and works. He grew up in Dewsbury Moor, West Yorkshire. From 1968 to 1971, Gormley studied archaeology, anthropology and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was attending at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Goldsmiths in London from 1974, and he completed his studies with a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London, between 1977 and 1979. Across five new bodies of work Antony Gormley presents his solo exhibition “Body Politic” that sets out to test and question this flux between sanctuary and control, freedom and discipline. He does this by calling upon languages intrinsic to sculpture – silence, stillness, materiality – allowing the viewer to become more aware of their own freedoms of movement and mind. As Gormley has recently stated: ‘Each part of this show is an attempt to assess and reflect on our present condition: us now.’ Forming the show’s spine, eight concrete sculptures chart a linear course from the courtyard through the white Cube Gallery’s corridor. Conceived by Gormley as ‘intimate bunkers for one’, each iteration of “Retreat” (2022–23) is cast to the scale of the artist’s body in 55 mm thick reinforced concrete. Presenting a ‘ground’, and grounded like “Retreat”, Gormley’s “Resting Place” (2023) unfolds across the expanse of South Gallery II, conjuring a dense urban landscape. This field of fired clay blocks materialises 243 body-forms as a labyrinthine terrain. In the North Gallery a series of six “Weave Works” map the volume of the human body. Cast from orthogonal, latticed cast iron bars and exposed to the elements, these rusty sculptures allow space and light to pass through them, creating an illusion of shifting density and bridging sculptural and architectural space. Within South Gallery I, three thick ribbons of rolled black steel extend from the floor, ceiling and walls, converging in the centre of the room to create a body zone of tangled orthogonal lines. The final work, “Stand” (2023), positioned in the 9x9x9 gallery, is made from a Jenga-like stack of Corten steel beams and rises to nearly 5 metres tall. This sculpture acknowledges the entropy of its own construction and the inherent vulnerability of all man-made creations, celebrating sculpture’s capacity to be a focus for hope as well as fear.
Photo: Antony Gormley, Resting Place, 2023, Terracotta, 244 figures, dimensions variable, © Antony Gormley, Courtesy the artis and White Cube Gallery
Info: White Cube Gallery, 144 – 152 Bermondsey Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 22/11/2023-28/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.whitecube.com/
