ANTONY GORMLEY: GEESTGROND AT KMSKA

 

ANTONY GORMLEY: GEESTGROND AT KMSKA

ANTONY GORMLEY: GEESTGROND AT KMSKA

May 23, 2026 - September 20, 2026

The most comprehensive solo exhibition of the legendary British artist in Europe

From 23 May to 20 September 2026, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) presents Antony Gormley. Geestgrond. This exhibition, created especially for the KMSKA, juxtaposes key works and new creations by Antony Gormley with the museum's collection and the architecture of the renovated building. Geestgrond is curated by internationally renowned Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, former artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13). The result is an exhibition in which sculpture, body and space constantly interact with each other.

For over fifty years, Antony Gormley (born 1950) has been captivating British and international audiences alike with his sculptures, installations and drawings. In addition to exhibitions at venues such as the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the British artist is also celebrated for his impactful works in public spaces, such as the monumental Angel of the North (1998) in Gateshead (Northern England) and Exposure (2010) in Lelystad, the Netherlands. At the heart of his acclaimed oeuvre is the human being. Using both minimal and powerful forms and materials ranging from wood to lead, Gormley explores how the body relates to nature and space.

“My work asks the questions: what can sculpture do and what does it feel like to be alive?” – Antony Gormley

A LANDMARK ENCOUNTER

This search for humanity's place in the world also forms the starting point for Geestgrond. The exhibition is the fruit of a unique collaboration between Gormley and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. For the KMSKA, she has engaged Gormley's oeuvre in a dialogue with the museum's collection and the building itself. However, the Geestgrond exhibition is not confined to the museum building: it extends to the roof, the museum square and even the quays further afield. Visitors will discover more than 100 works, from early sketches to sculptures and enterable works.

“This collaboration with a world-class contemporary artist underlines the ambition of the KMSKA. For the first time since its reopening in 2022, the modern galleries will be used entirely as exhibition space. With this project, we are not only exploring the boundaries of the museum building itself, but also venturing into public space.” – Luk Lemmens, chairman of KMSKA

More than a retrospective

The term 'geestgrond' refers to the fertile, sandy soil that formed in the Low Countries during the Ice Age. Simultaneously, the title connects the spiritual and the material, the human and the earthly. The exhibition explores the connection between our thoughts and feelings and the physical world. Geestgrond offers new perspectives on collection pieces by artists such as Rodin, Ensor and González. As in Gormley's work, humans and their environment, body and consciousness are inseparable.

The architecture of the KMSKA becomes part of the exhibition and, along with the works, forms a continuous spatial experience. Visitors make their way through the museum amongst Gormley's sculptures. They are not merely spectators, but participants where the lived experience of the visitor becomes part of the work.

"In the penultimate room lies The Heart, the core of the exhibition and an intimate Wunderkammer that draws visitors closer to Gormley's artistic process. Here, an exceptional presentation of early works, sketches, notebooks, drawings, photographs, books, raw materials and experiments reveals the core of his creativity." – Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator

The itinerary culminates in the monumental Cave (2019). The body, also a building, constructed from vast sheets of steel, occupies the entire room and invites visitors to step inside the work – a highlight of the exhibition, prompting one to ask where does the art lie – not simply in the object but in the lived experience of the viewer.

“Never before has Antony Gormley’s work been shown in such an ambitious and extensive way on the European mainland. With Geestgrond, the KMSKA brings his oeuvre to Antwerp in an exhibition project that elevates the museum experience to the highest level. The inspiring dialogue with contemporary sculpture sheds new light on the collection. At the same time, this project underlines the DNA of the museum: a place where art and visitors actively meet." – Carmen Willems, general director of KMSKA

LAND AND SEA AND AIR I, 1977 - 1979

Lead, Stone, Water, and Air

Dimensions: 20 × 27.5 × 24 cm (Land)

22 × 29 × 24 cm (Sea)

22 × 29 × 24 cm (Air)

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

MOTHER’S PRIDE V, 2019

Bread and Wax

Dimensions: 306 × 209.5 × 2 cm

Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands

MOTHER’S PRIDE V, 2019 (DETAIL)

OPEN DOOR, 1975

Anonymous Artist

Wooden Door

Dimensions: 204 × 206 × 1.2 cm

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

MOTHER’S PRIDE V, 2019 AND

MAN ROCK I, 1982

Portland Stone

Dimensions: 60 × 80 × 60 cm

Rigo Saitta Collection

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

ATTEND, 2025

Cast Iron

Dimensions: 191.6 x 49 x 33.1 cm.

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)
© Antony Gormley

FLAT TREE, 1978

Larch Wood

Diameter: 678 cm

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

EXERCISE BETWEEN BLOOD AND EARTH, 1979/2026 (DETAIL)

EXERCISE BETWEEN BLOOD AND EARTH, 1979/2026

Chalk on Wall

Diameter: 196 cm.

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

GEESTGROUND: ANTONY GORMLEY

ROYAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS ANTWERP (KMSKA)

D

Earth above ground

Ground in the head

Bodies in the ground, heads in the sky

Roots in the earth

Flowers in the light

Darkness of the earth

Antony Gormley15

D

As an introduction, this essay argued for experience as the only philosophical foundation that survived the catastrophe of the twentieth century – not system, not ideology, not the inherited frameworks of a culture that had proved capa ble of industrial murder, but the irreducible fact of the living body, of suffer ing undergone and witnessed, of a human presence that no abstraction could fully account for or extinguish. It would therefore be a formal contradiction to continue now with an abstract analysis of works and ideas, surveying Gormley’s practice from the outside, as though the body’s presence in a specific place and time were merely one theme among others. The argument demands that the essay enact what it claims. We will therefore go on a walkthrough: an account of moving through ‘Geestgrond’ as an embodied experience, in the order in which the exhibition is encountered, attending to what happens when a body – yours, mine, any body – moves through this space. As Gormley has said:

‘’ I want to change art from being an object to being a process. Art isn’t some thing that we look at; it’s something that we do, both viewer and artist, turning a noun into a transitive verb.16’’

Here we apply that transitive verb.

The word ‘experience’ carries its meaning in its Latin root. Experīre (from ex, meaning ‘out of’, and perire, ‘to die’): to go through to the edge of ruin, to pass through danger and survive it. Periculum: peril, trial, risk. Experience in this root sense is not the passive reception of impressions, nor Kant’s structured synthesis of sense data by the categories of the understanding,17 but the knowl edge that comes from having undergone something that could have destroyed you and did not. It is knowledge with a mortal edge, knowledge earned by traversal. This etymology is embodied in Gormley’s early practice itself, which, even now, as he digitally scans the body, he sometimes returns to. The casting process – the clingfilm, the plaster-soaked scrim applied by Vicken Parsons or others, the total vulnerability of a body held in a posture for up to several hours in hardening material, the cutting open that releases the figure from its mould – is precisely experīre: a passage through the edge of non-being, through a state of complete dependency and potential suffocation, into the air on the other side of the mould. Each experience of this process is a form of rebirth, contin gent on trust in the other. Gormley does not frame the casting as a rehearsal and repetition of near-death and rebirth, preferring to describe it as a way of attending to the body from the inside, of turning the body from object to place. His resistance is philosophically serious: to dramatise every casting as such a radical experience would introduce a heroic, theatrical register that the works themselves refuse. Their quality is quietness, not drama.

And if Kant’s German expression for experience – Erfahrung – from fahren, to travel, to go through – already suggests that experience is traversal rather than reception of data, and if Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s radical revision of phenom enology insists that this traversal is primordially bodily and pre-reflective, that the body does not process experience but is experience, then Gormley’s sculp tures participate in this philosophical evolution of the word experience not as illustration but as enactment. His works do not represent the body experiencing the world. They are positions from which the world is experienced. To stand before them – or to move through them – is to undergo something. As philoso pher Thomas Nail has most recently observed:

‘’ Thus, when we see Gormley’s sculptures on top of buildings, sunk into the ground, curled up on the floor, or pressed against walls, our brains process these different orientations as if we were in them […] We can be here, and there, and there, and there.18’’

Our agency, our very capacity to orient ourselves in the world, is woven from the agency of the bodies we encounter. Gormley’s figures extend that web. This conscious shift from the active modern subject perceiving and capturing the world to a form of subjectivity that is mutable and able to (ani)mistically be in habited by the metal or the plant in co-emergence brings together Western and non-Western worldly ontologies of Being.

Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958)19 – a book that also sits on Gorm ley’s shelf at home – offers a complementary scale of spatial experience: not the cosmic field of quantum physics or the planetary body of geological time, but the intimate geometries of inside and outside, the nest, the corner, the shell, the house as the first universe of the self. Bachelard’s phenomenology of the corner – the space into which a body retreats, the angle that receives and protects – resonates with Corner II (2022) in the exhibition’s western parcours, a concrete body-form pressed into an angle of the architecture, a body that has found its corner. But before we reach that room, much has already happened to us.

Before we enter, the exhibition has already begun, or ended.

Walking down Museumstraat toward the River Scheldt, in the opposite direction to the museum, you see what appears to be a low, grey, perfect horizon at the end of the street – a long, flat line, the sky opened onto the river. As one walks closer, something stands on it: a figure, light and transparent, barely there. Closer still, the horizon reveals itself to be a cement wall, the retaining structure of the riverbank, and the figure standing on its edge is one of three ‘Domain’ sculptures placed outside the museum for ‘Geestgrond’. Made from 10 mm square-section stainless-steel bars that trace the boundaries of the artist’s own body without enclosing them, each ‘Domain’ weighs only about 17 kilograms. They have no skin. You can see through them and beyond to whatever lies on the other side. Gormley has described20 how struck he was by this cement wall at the end of Museumstraat: he saw a grey line and imagined it was a horizon, yet when he walked toward it, he realised it was a wall built to prevent flooding. Once he understood it was a wall, the illusion needed to be broken – and he wanted somehow to restore both the wall and a real horizon, something which is always escaping you; the further you walk toward it, the further it retreats. By placing a ‘Domain’ figure on top of that cement wall, the illusion is broken sooner, and simultaneously a liberating gesture is made for the human gaze: the figure up high allows us to identify with that elevated position of the gaze and our intentionality toward the horizon is restored. The sculptural gesture is one of shaping the vertical axis above ground.

The troubling experience of revealing a false horizon is a precise perceptual event, and not an accidental one. In phenomenology, the horizon21 is not a line in the landscape but the structure of experience itself: the always-receding boundary of what can be perceived and known, the condition that gives a field to every figure. Edmund Husserl identified the horizon as the fundamental structure of intentionality in consciousness; Merleau-Ponty understood it as the body’s own horizon, the edge of what this particular flesh, in this particular place, can reach and see. Here, in Museumstraat, the horizon is sadly a modern wall – grey cement that closes the view to the river and the open water beyond. The ‘Domain’ figure stands on it – transparent, the diagram of a human body and holds the question open: what lies beyond the wall that blocks our sight? This is why we are not only at an exhibition in the classical sense, but a field: a resonance, a poetic reckoning with what it means to have – and be – an active body today. As Gormley has written of Another Place (1997), his 100 iron bodies that now stand on Crosby Beach in Merseyside:

‘’ The sea always beckons, pulling the body out to its perceptual limit, making us aware that ‘here’ is a very limited place and that ‘there’ is endless, bound ed by the event horizon of our perception.22’’

What he is attempting, he continues, ‘is to make reality into an object of contem plation’, a kind of antenna that sets up a field of energy resonating between the event horizon and the domestic.

The second ‘Domain’ stands in contemplation on the museum square, near Cristina Iglesias’s Deep Fountain (1997–2006) – a work that is itself a threshold between organic and architectural form, between the contained and the flowing, between the museum’s neoclassical solidity and the water that moves around it. And the third ‘Domain’ stands on the roof of the museum, among the late nine teenth-century sculptures that populate its parapet, looking out over Antwerp: an angel on the roof, in relation to the other life-size figures already up there. Three figures: one above the city on the roof, one at ground level near the water, one down the street on the false horizon. An axis punctuated by ‘Domain’ sculptures extended through the urban field. As Gormley has written of the ‘Domain’ series:

‘’ Small linear elements indicate the body zone as an energy field of disparate and randomly oriented trajectories within a bounding skin.23’’

This is the body not as a closed form, but as a field, a bounded zone of energy, transparent to the world it inhabits.

Entering the museum through the main entrance on the north façade of the build ing, through the twentieth-century lobby, the first Gormley work encountered inside is Brace (2023), a ‘Weave’ sculpture – made from 20 mm square-section mild steel bar, the body constructed from an accumulation of small cubic units rather than cast from a mould – propped halfway up the grand staircase to our right. Brace is caught between two worlds: the Gormley exhibition below and the Baroque masters above, where the museum’s permanent collection hangs, the great Rubens of Antwerp, the abundance of flesh in paint. To brace is to prepare for impact, to hold firm against a force, to reinforce a structure under pressure. Between one understanding of the body in art and another entirely, the figure braces. Passing it, a visitor faces a choice – ascend toward Rubens, or remain below and transition into ‘Geestgrond’. ‘How can you begin to describe the indoors of the body, or the body at rest?’, Gormley has asked. Exploring the feeling of being and of inhabiting a still body-space is important: ‘the “Weave” works come out of this investigation of the body as a place of indwelling and what it feels like to look out from this space’.24

In the Keyserzaal, the entry hall of the exhibition proper, two works are placed in immediate proximity so that the visitor must pass between them: Auguste Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid (1881–82, cast 1924) and Gormley’s Small Stop (Lead) VII (2015). The Rodin is bronze, small – 43 cm in height – and depicts a female figure col lapsed beneath the architectural weight she was made to support. The caryatid is the body as structural column, the human form conscripted into architecture’s ser vice. Here she has failed: her head bows, her spine curves, her limbs fold inward. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin’s secretary and the author of a monograph on the sculptor that also sits on Gormley’s shelf at home, wrote that in Rodin’s figures, there is no place that does not live, that the movement seems to originate from within. The Fallen Caryatid lives in exactly this way – the weight pressing down is felt from inside the bronze, not merely represented on its surface.

And yet, opposite the Rodin bronze on the floor, is Gormley’s Small Stop (Lead) VII, a compact, dense combination of blocks of lead, abstract yet still recognisa bly a body – a figure in foetal compression, stopped, stilled. It does not represent weight as Rodin’s caryatid represents it. It is weight. Where Rodin’s 18.1 kilogram sculpture still depicts compression and gravity, Gormley’s similar-sized 115 kilo gram sculpture embodies them. The lead block sits on the floor with a gravita tional intensity that seems to draw the space around it downward, like into a black hole. You feel it before you fully see it. Lead is an insulator, Gormley has said:

‘’ The most malleable and the densest metal. It has the capability of taking on a form and also holding it; it’s completely impenetrable visually, radioactively.25’’

This is the first lesson of the exhibition: that Gormley’s sculpture operates not at the level of representation but at the level of physical fact, of matter doing what matter does. It is also a lesson in ecology and nuclear history: lead is the material that shields against radiation, that insulates against the century’s most catastrophic threat – ‘the quietness of the tomb’,26 Gormley has said elsewhere, and of the nuclear age. To walk between the Rodin and the Gormley is to move between two understandings of what sculpture can do: one that represents the body under pressure, and one that simply is that pressure, embodied in matter.

Gormley wants his works to activate space, implicating us in the fields they create: reflexive environments in which the perception of our own experience becomes the subject. This meditation on representation and substance, initiated in the Keyserzaal, will unfold through all the spaces our bodies traverse.

From the Keyserzaal, the visitor passes into the room of Orbit Field III (2026): 37 rings of 23 mm square-section aluminium tube, radiating outward to fill the entire gallery, their arcs overlapping, crossing, describing a field of concentric and eccentric orbits. The rings are not arranged at uniform angles; they describe an irregular, breathing geometry, as though the field were in slow rotation. You do not look at Orbit Field III: you enter it. The rings pass around and above you, at floor level and overhead, their aluminium catching the light at different an gles as you move. Your own movement through the work changes it – or rather, changes your perception of it, which amounts to the same thing. This is Gorm ley’s reflexive environment: the perception of your own experience becomes the subject. You become aware of your body moving through space, of the space moving through your body, in a way that ordinary gallery circulation does not produce. Orbit Field III might also suggest a materialisation of the invisible electromagnetic mesh – the radio waves, telephone signals, surveillance lines – that already permeates the spaces we inhabit. By making it physical, by letting us see and move through it, we are given a form of agency and alertness: the work makes visible what normally tracks us invisibly, and in making it visible, returns to us the sense that we are choosing our own paths through it.

Orbit Field III opens into the long survey gallery of early works on the western flank of the building. On its wall, the visitor reads not an institutional wall text (which Gormley abhors as it mediates the viewers’ experience), but the poet Walt Whitman’s lines from ‘Song of Myself’ (1855):

‘’ I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.27’’

Whitman dissolves the boundary between self and other at the level of matter it self – the atom as the unit of democratic sharing, the body as something that be longs equally to everyone who stands before it. This is the philosophical ground from which Gormley’s practice grows: the body not as private property but as a site that belongs to whoever encounters it. ‘I am trying to return the mind to the  body’,28 says Gormley in his notes on the Body and Soul prints from 1990. ‘One cannot touch the body without considering the soul.’29 And beside that: ‘My work [...] is rooted in a particular example of a human experience of embodiment. It is offered back to the world as a displacement, hopefully with some affordance.’30

Here, before the early works, stands Attend (2025) – a new work from Gormley’s ‘Brancher’ series, its cast-iron body dense and rust-coloured, branching outward from a central axis as though growing from within. Attend is a figure from today, like us, standing among works from 50 years ago. Not a historical exhibit but a contemporary presence, he welcomes visitors into the gallery of early works like a page or a valet introducing us to his own origins. To attend is to be present, to wait, to pay attention, to serve. Attend witnesses the early works and wit(h)nesses them.31 We stand between and with them – between this figure made in 2025 and the sculptures that preceded it – and the room becomes a fold in time.

To the left of Attend, three photographs of the ephemeral action Rearranged De sert hang on the wall: the Mojave Desert, USA, in summer 1979, the flat expanse of dry lake bed, the horizon meeting the mountains beyond. In the first image, we see in the distance a pile of stones at the centre of an area the artist has cleared. In the second, the young artist stands near the pile, arm raised – photo graphed by Vicken Parsons at the moment of throwing a stone. The artist’s own body, tiny against the vast horizontal field, is the first appearance of the body as coordinate within a planetary terrain in Gormley’s work: the GPS figure of our opening argument made literal, a human being as a marker, a position, a placeholder indicating a precise location in space from which the world unfolds. Gormley has spoken of this action directly:

‘’ In 1979 I went back to the place where Walter De Maria made his parallel chalk line drawings [...] Here, I simply threw a hand-sized stone as far as I could, cleared all the stones within that radius, made a pile that I stood on, and then I threw them out again.’’

‘’ [...] You can just see, in the middle of this picture, where the pile was. There’s a kind of absent body there [...] I offer it to you as an image but for me it was an experience [...]. What kind of space mentally, physically, imaginatively does it transmit to others? 32’’

The third photograph shows the quiet desert, rearranged.

On the opposite entrance wall, facing Attend, is the painting Calvary of Hendrik van Rijn (c. 1363): oil and gold leaf on panel, the Crucifixion depicted within a square, geometrically ordered field. Christ’s body is stretched along the cross’s vertical and horizontal axes, where geometry wounds the body even as the body gives geometry meaning. Below him, the kneeling donor Hendrik van Rijn touches the base of the cross, his clasped hands completing a chain of contact between the praying human body and the body fixed to the structure above. Beyond the inscription that records his name and the date, we know almost nothing about who Hendrik van Rijn was. He is everyman at the foot of the cross, a body in devotion before a body in extremity. The gold ground is animated by small punched motifs – a geometric field organised through repetition and modular units – that place the Crucifixion within an ordered visual cosmos. The human condition, the painting proposes, is one of being suspended between the unreachable mathematical order of God and the cosmos above, and the fallible, draped, bodily world below – entangled with the ground beneath, with Adam’s skull and bones depicted just below the cross, underground. Geestgrond: spirit-ground, the ground that is also a skull; matter that remembers death. Attend and the Calvary: 662 years between them, with the modernist grid in be tween, and the question is similar. What does it mean to be a body positioned at this crossing point? What does the body know from having been placed there?

In the same gallery of early works, Horkheimer and Adorno’s sentence from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944):

‘’ Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things.33’’

Written in 1944 and circulated in manuscript, this is the same post-war philo sophical caesura that grounds the roots of Gormley’s art, as described above in the Introduction. The early works in this gallery are Gormley’s systematic re versal of that sentence: a practice devoted to restoring souls to things, or rather, to dissolving the distinction between them. As he wrote in a workbook in 1978, beside Full Bowl (1977–78) and Land Sea and Air I (1977–79):

We can enquire into experience

through substance.

We can experience substance through

our enquiry.

 

It is very difficult to make

substance ‘stand for’ experience,

 since the experience of substance is

complete in itself.34

Matter is not a vehicle for meaning. Matter is meaning. Art, he wrote in 1988, is ‘as critical an aspect of survival as hunting or gathering food’35 – the non-utilitar ian skill as an act of will for the future.

Moving along the gallery, the early works mark successive encounters. Open Door (1975) – a wooden door, the earliest work in the gallery, is simply a door, sliced, with the segments turned sideways to open slits. A modified door hung on a wall is a threshold with nothing on either side, a passage that goes no where, an opening that does not open onto anything. It is also Gormley’s first lesson to himself: that the simplest object, met with full seriousness, discloses a world.

The lead forms of Land Sea and Air I: three objects – a lead-covered stone, the lead mould of the stone with water inside, another mould with nothing but air inside. The world’s most fundamental distinctions – solid, liquid, gas; earth, water, sky – held in lead, their contents preserved and sealed. Gormley’s work book entry from 1978 reads like a poem:

‘’ The cave is a gift to the earth from the air. The rock is a gift to the earth from the sea. The lake is a gift from the sea to the land.36’’

And from another workbook that same year:

Land Sea Air

I completed this piece last night in great euphoria

The skin – within a new volume

The relationship of structure to fluidity

A gift from the past to the future

The general to the specific

 Impenetrable

Isolated

Insulated

The shield37

The shield: lead as protection against the nuclear threat that haunts the entire decade, the decade of ‘Protect and Survive’,38 the decade in which the most like ly agent of human destruction was nuclear Armageddon. As Gormley has said:

‘’Questions around the continuance of the human project in relation to the biosphere started at the time of the Cold War.’’39

The lead body-cases are an artistic response to that question.

Nearby, Full Bowl: lead bowls nested one inside the other, containing vessels of ever smaller sizes until they reach one small void at the core. The lead bowl is the first hollow – the first space defined by its own enclosure – and it connects directly to Bachelard’s poetics: the vessel as the most intimate spatial form, the architecture of receiving. And Mother’s Pride V (2019), the fifth version of a work created initially in 1982: a grid of small slices of bread and wax with a single body-shaped void at its centre, the shape of a foetus produced by eating slices of white, industrially-processed bread. Bread – the most elemental human food, the stuff of life and of communion – arranged ironically in a geometric field around an absence. ‘Bread and settled human life go together’, as Gormley has explained:

‘’Mother’s Pride imposes the memory of the foetal body on a manufactured life-supporting material.’’40

The body has eaten itself into the bread.

Then Natural Selection (1981): nearly 12 metres long, a row of 24 natural and cultural objects selected by a single criterion of morphological similarity, from a pea to a ball. Gormley wrote in 1979:

‘’ On the threshold, the works are gifts of the products of nature and culture to each other. They are an attempt to stop time and re-present the world. In revelation or insulation there is no concern to make things stand for anything other than what they are.’’41

And Seeds VI (2008), the sixth version of a work initially created in 1986: hun dreds of small lead bullets on the floor, scattered like seeds that have not yet germinated. Lead seeds: heavy, the opposite of growth, and yet called ‘seeds’ – the material of bullets given the association of biological beginnings. Man Rock I (1982): Portland stone, the contour of the body carved into the stone as it wraps itself around the rock, a form simultaneously body and rock, not yet fully separated from the geological material from which the human emerges.

Near the end of the gallery, Blanket Drawing I (1983): white clay, white blanket, and linseed oil – a registration of the position of the body when sleeping on the blanket under which it would lie. In his discussion of the ‘Blanket Drawings’, Gormley writes:

‘’In registering the sleeping body as an absence in a field of clay, it begins to float as if immersed in water – the kind of locomotion that interests me be cause it is not about causal action but about participation in a medium.’’42

And then there’s Flat Tree (1978): over 6 metres in diameter, the trunk of a larch tree sliced into circular sections and arranged on the floor in a spiral moving from the smallest discs at the centre – the top of the tree, the youngest growth – to the progressively larger sections that correspond to the base and its oldest rings. The entire life of a tree made horizontal, its vertical time laid out as a mandala on the floor. As Gormley has written: ‘there are languages before the word: that are in the grain of materials and deep in ourselves’.43 The grain of the larch is that language. This work echoes some of the artist Giuseppe Penone’s interests when exploring trees and their growth, from his Albero di 4 metri in 1969 right through to the present day. Yet, while Penone collapses representation and reality, revealing the tree at an earlier age concealed within an industrial wooden beam, Gormley’s attention focuses on repetition and difference, time as a pattern of lines, and how the inside of a tree is the same as its outside through the growth of concen tric layers of wood, building it up over time in organic cellular celebration. The understanding of such patterns lies at the very beginning of sculpture in human civilisation, acknowledged by Gormley from early on as he studied art history and anthropology at university from 1968 to 1971.

The concentric spiral of Flat Tree is echoed nearby by Exercise Between Blood and Earth (1979/2026): pink-red concentric chalk circles of the silhouette of a running man drawn on the wall, 196 cm in diameter, inward and outward circles, life sus pended in a movement that never stabilises as it expands and contracts.

We enter from here into a second gallery of works – an oneiric room of lead body-cases, proprioceptively distorted to embody the feeling of being in a space. Each is an air-filled plaster and fibreglass mould, covered in lead, of the artist’s body in a precise state of Erfahrung, of experience undergone. On the room’s wall, sentences from Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space:

‘’ Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense.’’44

In a workbook from around 1985, Gormley asks:

When? Why important now? How?

Alchemy: balance of spirit and body, science and artist. Wholeness.

By acting on matter we act on ourselves.

Transmutation of base metals.45

The alchemical premise: the work on the outside changes the inside, the moulding of lead around the body’s form is simultaneously a transmutation of self.

Tree (1984) is 472 cm tall – a vertical figure so elongated it becomes almost abstract, the body’s neck stretched upward by the force of its own aspiration toward height. Field (1984–85) is 551 cm wide, arms stretched open, occupying the room’s full width – the body as the cross’s horizontal beam, the body as geestgrond in its most literal spatial form: rooted at the feet, extending outward to both sides, open to the width of the world.

‘My work is to make bodies into vessels / that both contain and occupy space’, Gormley wrote in a 1985 artist’s note.46 Edge (1985) is a horizontal lead body projecting from the wall at the height of a person lying on a bed, the body can tilevered into space, defying gravity by the tension of its own projection. And from a 1987 workbook:

‘’I do believe in stressing the physical aspect of consciousness because I believe that is what connects us as human beings [...] My job in a broken but self-conscious world is to reaffirm connection. The world and my body I must identify as one.’’47

These sculptures inhabit the gallery alongside James Ensor’s Mer grise (Grey Sea scape) (1880) – an oil-on-canvas painting of the North Sea coast near Ostend, the Belgian shore that Ensor knew from childhood, a grey sky meeting a grey sea at a horizon that is barely distinguishable from the air above it. The horizon here is not blocked by a cement wall, as it was in Museumstraat. It is open, receding, a line that cannot be reached. Ensor was nineteen or twenty when he painted this. It is a young artist’s painting of infinite and ever-changing space, of the world opening outward without limit – in striking contrast with the flamboyant, satirical, proto-Expression ist paintings of masks and crowds for which he became famous from 1888 onwards. Here, you find a solitary gaze onto nature. The view dissolves into almost parallel registers of grey, muted brown and blue-green, with lead-white impasto highlight ing the crests of the waves. The atmosphere is perceived through the dissolution of boundaries between the elements: beach, sea, and sky merge into one another, the grey weather absorbing distinct forms into a continuous whole. In the far distance on the left, a faint splash of white and yellow suggests a lone sailboat – a measure of human smallness before the scale of sea and sky. Gormley found this painting lovely. Its dreamy, dissolving horizon may have resonated with his own early mem ories of the Sussex coast, where he spent summers with his maternal grandmother at a home owned by his parents, passing long hours on the beach following the time of the elements rather than the clock. From his 1992 workbook:

West Wittering

‘’Out to sea, drawn by the openness of the light, the pools of moving water, the sight of people moving half buried in shimmering light [...] There is an easy way to walk in water, knee deep; you have to move slowly and allow the legs to bend and fall with their own weight, it leads to dreaminess, to be[ing] held by the resistance, held by the light, the realm of sea, cries of sea-birds diving and gliding low over the water [...] The light to sea was silver and blue and bleached. Turning around the colours and frippery of the human coast seemed petty and tawdry. The big grey-back birds and Arctic terns and oystercatchers and sandpipers were catching the light, white against the sea. What lovely crashing, silver, skiing, bleached forms in the air these birds are.’’48

The material connection with the lead body-cases in the same room is not incidental. In Ensor’s plumbeous seascape, lead is oxidised into the thick white impasto of the waves; in Gormley’s work, it is grey and dense, moulded around the contours of the body. The phenomenology they share is one of horizontal ex pansion and dull weight – the feeling of the body expanding laterally into space.

In the corner of this room, we reach Corner II: concrete, a body compressed into an angle of the architecture, finding its corner in Bachelard’s sense – the most intimate spatial form, the angle that receives and protects. As soon as we become motionless, Bachelard wrote, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Corner II has become motionless. The immensity is inside it.

Leaving the second gallery of the oneiric, extended body, a narrow corridor leads the visitor toward the south lobby of the museum – and here Butt (2022) is encountered: a ‘Weave’ figure turned away, presenting its back as we move through the passage ahead. It is a body in transit and it makes you move.

If the long galleries just visited were to be felt as a movement through the first half of a lying architectural body, the back lobby – symmetrical to the Keyser zaal at the entrance – is the head. Here, in this transitional space at the south entrance of the building, facing onto the outdoor sculpture garden, we stand halfway through the exhibition.

In Dutch, geestgrond is a raised landform created by glacial movement during the Ice Age. Yet the term applies just as well to sculpture. Gormley often refers to sculp ture, and indeed all living things, as ‘earth above ground’.49 Sculpture is materialised thought and binds ground to memory, matter to mind. From the bulging cave walls used by early painters to suggest the three-dimensionality of bison to the figurines of the Upper Palaeolithic to the art of today, humans have made painting and sculp ture to connect with our fellow creatures and our planetary home.

Two wall quotations anchor this space, both from books that are part of Gorm ley’s library. First, Hannah Arendt, from The Human Condition (1958):

‘’ The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice.’’50

And second, from another admirer of Arendt’s book, the artist and art historian William Tucker, with a quotation from The Language of Sculpture (1974):

‘’ A strong relation between the form of the object and the ground on which it lies […] has been central to the most vital modern sculpture since Rodin. Gravity unites sculpture and spectator in a common dependence on and re sistance to the pull of the Earth. Materials and structure, volume and space, the unity and proportions of sculpture, do not speak for themselves, but ar ticulate a complex and profound sense of our own being in the world. Because the object is fixed and still, its ‘life’ consists in the evocation, remaking even, of our freedom to move, within the given terms of its own structure.’’51

Tucker names gravity as the great equaliser, the force that makes the viewer and the work members of the same physical community. The very essence of ‘Geestgrond’.

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https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2014/04/antony-gormley-states-conditions-at.html

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https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2015/03/antony-gormley-second-body-at-galerie.html

https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2013/04/antony-gormley-at-xavier-hufkens-gallery.html

https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2013/05/antony-gormley-at-middelheim-museum.html

https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2013/12/british-artist-antony-gormley.html

ORBIT FIELD III, 2026

37 Rings of 23 mm Square Section Aluminium Tube

and Stainless Steel Spigots

Dimensions Variable.

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

CAVE, 2019

8 mm

Weathering Steel

Dimensions: 732 × 1411 × 1137 cm.

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

MURMUR, 2014

20 mm

Square Section

Stained Stainless-Steel Tube and Plastic Spigots

Dimensions: 420.5 × 430 × 411 cm.

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

FORM IV, 2014

Cast Iron

Dimensions: 73 × 55.5 × 65.5 cm

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

TREE, 1984

Lead, Fibreglass, Plaster and Air

Dimensions: 472 × 60 × 30 cm.

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

EDGE, 1985,

Lead, Fibreglass, Plaster and Air

Dimensions: 25 × 58 × 195 cm

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

CORNER II, 2022

Concrete

Dimensions: 90 × 68 × 80.5 cm.

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

CORNER II, 2022 AND

FIELD, 1984–85

Lead, Fibreglass, Plaster and Air

Dimensions: 196 × 551 × 42 cm

© Antony Gormley

THE ROYAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS ANTWERP (KMSKA)

ABOUT KMSKA 

Seven centuries of art: from Flemish Primitives to Expressionists. World-famous masters. The largest and most important collections of James Ensor and Rik Wouters. Yet the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp is much more than even this internationally renowned collection of art. The KMSKA is the only Flemish museum with high-level scientific status.

Not only are we responsible for conserving, managing and expanding our collection, we also carry out scholarly research into the works, the techniques used, colour, visual language and more besides. In doing so, we challenge received wisdom. We share our newly acquired interpretations with the public, enriching the knowledge of art lovers. The KMSKA operates according to the charter of ICOM, the International Council of Museums.

THE FINEST MISSION

The KMSKA manages an outstanding collection of visual art from the Southern Netherlands from the 14th to the 20th centuries, supplemented by international masterpieces. Within the grandeur of an inspiring historic building, we make this art tradition accessible to a wide audience. We share our knowledge on a human scale, through stories that amaze, enrich and connect.

The KMSKA is a museum of European excellence:

We focus on providing a high-quality leisure experience. In doing so, we cherish traditions and respond to new trends. We add an extra dimension to the classic museum experience through exhibitions with a 'must-see' signature. To this end, we take a multidisciplinary approach to our collection. We are hospitable and create a warm environment that stirs up emotions.

We promote the KMSKA as the centre of expertise for James Ensor. We expand our leading position by further investing in research into materials, documentation and the sharing of knowledge. We play a pivotal role in the research on Rubens, in collaboration with Antwerp partners.

We form an enthusiastic and professional team, and convey this to our visitors, partners, authorities and other museums. We are willing to learn. We actively involve our audience in our operations.

THE ART OF COLLECTING

How do you assemble an art collection that embraces seven centuries? And how did the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (KMSKA), come to be founded? Take a walk with us in the museum’s history, from one milestone to another.

THE BEGINNING OF A COLLECTION

1382: Guild of St Luke

In 1382 Antwerp’s painters, sculptors, stained-glass artists, embroiderers, goldsmiths and silversmiths joined together in the Guild of St Luke. Notable names like Jan Brueghel (1602), Otto van Veen (1603) and Cornelis de Vos (1619) all feature in the membership rolls as well as in the KMSKA’s collection.

Guild members held their meetings and festivities at the ‘Painter’s Chamber’, which they also decorated with examples of their work. In 1556, for instance, Frans Floris painted Luke, the guild’s patron saint, to adorn the chamber and in 1633, Rubens presented it with his Holy Family with a Parrot.

1663: Founding of the Academy

David Teniers the Younger founded an academy under the auspices of the Guild of St Luke to offer young artists a comprehensive curriculum of humanities, sciences and fine arts. They were taught the principles of perspective and architecture and drew from plaster casts and life models.

A need swiftly arose for extra space and so the guild and its academy moved as early as 1664 to a wing of the commercial exchange (Handelsbeurs). The magnificent interior design was provided by Jacob Jordaens, Theodor Boeijermans and many other members too.

The Guild of St Luke was disbanded in 1773 and its art collection was inherited by the academy.

1794: French Looting

French revolutionary troops occupied the city in 1794 and closed down its churches and abbeys. They stripped the religious institutions of their artworks, the most important of which were shipped off to Paris where they were exhibited at the Louvre along with art stolen from other countries.

Napoleon founded the Antwerp museum by imperial decree on 5 May 1810 and installed the academy and its collection at the vacant Franciscan monastery in Mutsaardstraat. The church and part of the monastery were set up as public galleries and the academy is still located there today.

1815: Stolen Artworks Returned

The Flemish masters made their way home again after the Battle of Waterloo. A substantial proportion of the looted works arrived in Antwerp by train on 5 December 1815. Twenty-six paintings – mostly by Rubens – were placed in the recently founded academy museum.

The 1817 catalogue lists 127 items – a small collection, but of the highest quality. The nucleus comprised works from the second half of the 16th century and the 17th century, with Rubens as the crowning glory.

1840: Generous Knight

The collection received a major boost in 1840, when the art collector and knight Florent van Ertborn bequeathed artistic gems by the likes of Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling and Jean Fouquet. The former mayor of Antwerp left 144 paintings to the museum in his native city.

Van Ertborn’s legacy corrected the earlier bias of the collection towards 16th and 17th-century works, by enriching it with masterpieces from the 14th, 15th and early 16th centuries. It was one of the largest bequests in the museum’s history.

1851: Academicians’ Museum

The museum and academy took the first steps in 1850 towards building a collection of contemporary art. The Academy founded an ‘Academic Corps’ and the leading artists who joined were required to donate both a work of art and a portrait. The ‘academicians’ museum’ as it was called steadily developed into a genuine collection of modern art, with over a hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints. Important artists like Antoine Wiertz, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, August Kiss, Alexandre Cabanel and William Adolphe Bouguereau were all given a prominent place in the ‘academic gallery’.

1873: a New Department For Modern Art

The museum purchased its first work by living artists at the Antwerp Salon in 1873. The new modern masters department was supplemented by six paintings by artists with links to the academy. From then on, the museum would regularly buy art at official salons, with preference given to work of a rather conservative and patriotic character.

A TRUE MUSEUM OF ART FOR ANTWERP

The upshot of all this growth was predictable: the academy museum began to run out of space. Climate control and fire safety were no longer fit for purpose either. The city daydreamed out loud about a new museum of fine arts and, having weighed up all the options, decided in 1875 to build a museum on recently cleared land in the Antwerp South district, where the Spanish fortress had once stood. When the Belgian state also backed the project, there was nothing standing in the city’s way.

1877: ‘Competition to Establish a Museum of Fine Arts’

Antwerp City Council held a competition to design a new museum but none of the entries was entirely convincing. The city eventually invited the young architects Jean Jacques Winders and Frans Van Dijk to combine their respective designs in a single plan. They took everything into account, from a sense of grandeur to functionality and security.

The new museum would be a standalone structure with galleries located high above the ground. This ensured a safe distance in terms of fire risk between the art and the nearby residential neighbourhood, while potential flooding would not affect the exhibits either. The architects went even further, installing a fire and bomb-proof basement in the middle of the building.

First and foremost, it was a daylight museum, with a variety of lighting angles to show sculpture and paintings to the best effect. Windows in the walls lit the statues on the first floor, with skylights for the paintings on the upper storey.

1890: Opening

After six years of construction work, the new museum opened to the public on 11 August 1890 with a large-scale celebration attended by Mayor Leopold De Wael and the members of the City Council. The event began with a ceremony at the Town Hall with various dignitaries, painters and sculptors, following which the guests walked to the museum in a colourful procession. On arrival, they were served a sumptuous banquet in the new building.

1894: A Shameful Chapter in the History of the Museum Square: the World Exhibition 

In 1894, Antwerp hosted a second World Exhibition. The colonial section was set up on this occasion by the administrators of the Congo Free State. The colony was on the brink of bankruptcy at the time and Leopold II and his staff seized on the World Exhibition to whitewash the project’s image and as a propaganda opportunity. The enlarged colonial section consisted of a Congo Pavilion, a diorama and the reconstruction of a Congolese village, all located on the square in front of the KMSKA (what is now Leopold De Waelplaats).  144 Congolese people were brought over for public display. During the day they were made to perform activities for visitors, such as basket-weaving, metalwork, playing music and carving. At night, they slept in military barracks. These degrading conditions had an even worse dimension, as the project took a heavy physical toll on those involved: 44 of them fell ill as a result of the sea journey or their stay in Antwerp, and seven of them died. Bitio, Sabo, Isokoyé, Manguesse, Binda, Mangwanda and Pezo, all aged between 17 and 31, were buried in the city’s Schoonselhof cemetery.

1905: The Triumph of Art and Art of Today

G. van Bergen contractors employed a dozen men to hoist Thomas Vinçotte’s pair of chariots to the roof. With a team of two horses and a charioteer apiece, they were intended to symbolize the triumph of art and have been the emblem of the museum ever since they were installed.

The Antwerp Franck family plays an important role in the growth of the modern art collection. As the central figure François Franck, establishes the association Kunst van Heden (Art of Today) in 1905 and Friends of Modern Art in 1925. He encouraged everyone in his network to buy and donate art to the museum. Through purchases and donations, the museum enriched its collection with important modern works of art: from Belgian Impressionism to Flemish Expressionism. With, among others, James Ensor and Gustave Van De Woestyne, Ossip Zadkine and Marc Chagall.

WAR AND RENOVATION

1914: The First World War

The museum took immediate and drastic action on the outbreak of the First World War. The building and its gardens were closed and staff took all the artworks down into the bomb-proof basement. Churches and other public institutions were also able to store their artistic treasures there. It was briefly considered that a field hospital should be installed in the now empty galleries, but in the end, the staff took the opportunity to refurbish the interior. Just in time, because the German occupier gave permission for the museum to reopen in 1915. In the event, only the modern art department opened its doors again, with the old masters remaining safely in the basement.

1925: Museum Too Small

The development of the building has always been closely linked to the growth of the museum’s collection. In less than 40 years of its opening, the museum was already too small and four internal courtyards were covered over to create additional gallery space. The interior windows were removed and the galleries now began to look like a modern museum space.

1940: the Museum During the Second World War

A secure basement needs a fully developed contingency plan to be truly effective. Right from the outset, the museum was designed with trapdoors in the floor of the central galleries to allow works of art to be hoisted safely into the basement in an emergency. When the Second World War broke out, museum staff lowered numerous paintings into the underground shelter once again.

Not that this meant there was no longer any threat. At 9.45 in the morning of 13 October 1944, the very first German flying bomb landed on Antwerp, right next to the museum. Thirty-two people were killed and the museum and some of its artworks were badly damaged. The glass roofs shattered. It took years to repair the damage suffered during the war.

THE FIRST BLOCKBUSTER

1976–77: Rubens Year

In 1977 Antwerp staged a grandiose ‘Rubens Year’ celebration in which the city’s businesses and institutions queued up to take part. The KMSKA obviously had to be involved too, but the building had fallen into disrepair and was in no state to welcome modern visitors properly. There was no electric lighting in the galleries, for instance. Large-scale renovations began on 3 August 1976.

One year later, the museum was ready for the most extensive and varied of all the Rubens Year initiatives. The public responded enthusiastically to both the exhibition and the refurbishment. A total of 625,000 visitors were drawn to the museum, making the event a genuine blockbuster, even by today’s standards.

1989: Rik Wouters

In 1989, Baron Ludo van Bogaert and his wife Marie-Louise Sheid donated their substantial collection of works by Rik Wouters to the KMSKA: 13 paintings, eight sculptures and 36 drawings and watercolours. In addition to the world’s most important Ensor collection, the museum now boasts the biggest Wouters collection too.

1999: A City Square With Art

The museum stands on something of an island visually, so the City Council had the square in front of it redesigned by the architects Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem in collaboration with Marie-José van Hee. A sculpture by Josuë Dupon and four heads by Rodin taken from the former Loos monument, offer a taste of the art inside. A bench by Ann Demeulemeester invites you to meet, Deep Fountain by Cristina Iglesias to meditate.

FORWARD LOOKING GRANDEUR

2003: A Master Plan For the KMSKA

The Flemish Government Architect bOb Van Reeth issued an open call to draw up a master plan for the KMSKA. The brief was to update the museum building in keeping with 21st-century needs.

In 2006, KAAN Architects of Rotterdam were commissioned to go ahead with the plan. The firm opted for an impressive makeover from a 19th-century museum to one firmly oriented to the future.

2011: Large-Scale Renovation

The most recent renovation began in the autumn of 2011 to put KAAN Architects’ master plan into practice. The historic building has regained its grandeur, while a brand-new museum volume has been inserted at the core. The spatial experience and play of light in the new building are overwhelming.

You may click below link for more to read from KMSKA Museum web page.

https://kmska.be/en/about-kmska/history

THE ROYAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS ANTWERP (KMSKA)

TREE WITHOUT EARS, 1975 (MODEL)

Oak Wood

Dimensions: 57 x 72 x 51 cm

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

FIELD SCULPTURES, 1989 - 1991

Clay

Dimensions Variable

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

EARTH, 1986

Blood on Paper

Dimensions: 28 x 38cm

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

BENEATH, 1992

Carbon and Casein on Paper

Dimensions: 14 x 19cm

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

EARTHMAN, 2023

ANGEL OF THE NORTH, 1996

Bronze Edition 7 of 12

Dimensions: 99 × 282 × 20 cm

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

DOMAIN CI, 2025

10 mm Square Section

Stainless Steel Bar

Dimensions: 186.2 × 69.2 × 29.5 cm.

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

DOMAIN XCVII, 2025

10 mm Square Section

Stainless Steel Bar

Dimensions: 188.5 × 66.9 × 36.3 cm.

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

FRONT II, 2022 20 mm

Square-Section Mild Steel Bar

Dimensions: 178 × 53.2 × 66 cm

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

LEAN, 2023

20 mm

Square Section Mild Steel Bar

Dimensions: 157.3 × 48.8 × 111 cm.

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

BUTT, 2022

20 mm

Square Section Mild Steel Bar

Dimensions: 177.3 × 50.9 × 44.7 cm.

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

RISE, 1983 - 1984

Lead, Fibreglass, Plaster and Air

Dimensions: 37 × 54 × 202.5 cm.

Courtesy Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)

© Antony Gormley

ANTONY GORMLEY

1950

Antony Gormley is born in London to devoutly Catholic parents, Jack Gormley and Elspeth Brauninger. He is the youngest of seven siblings.

1951 – 1960

Summer months are spent at his parents’ house in West Wittering, Sussex, where the gift of his own small rowing boat becomes his gateway to explore the freedom of the sea, later extended through learning to sail. Back in London, he takes over the family’s garden shed. He transforms it into his own laboratory and starts a small museum, filling it with his own finds from the Roman villa site at Fishbourne, along with shells, nests and other archaeological treasures gifted by his family – including a set of hafted Palaeolithic axes from a Swiss lake, given by his maternal German grandfather.

Father Bruce Kent, one of the founding members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, is a family friend. While serving at his mass, the young Gormley absorbs the weight of the looming nuclear threat.

His father introduces him to his favourite paintings at the National Gallery: Piero della Francesca’s The Nativity (early 1480s) and El Greco’s Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple (c. 1600). On a visit to the British Museum, he is stunned by the scale and power of the large granite heads of Amenhotep III and Ramses II, as well as the winged Lamassu from the palace of Sargon II.

1961 – 1968

Gormley’s secondary education is at Ampleforth College, a Benedictine boarding school in North Yorkshire. He discovers French literature and Classics, and learns woodwork, drawing, pottery, and painting. He is struck by the wide-open spaces and dramatic weather of the North Yorkshire moors, and the confined spaces of the caves at Gormire Lake near the school: openings for his imagination. The stark white domes of RAF Fylingdales – an early warning station for nuclear attacks – appear on the moors north of the school.

1968 – 1971

He studies Archaeology, Anthropology and Art History at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, where he becomes politically active – protesting against the Vietnam War and the invitation for Enoch Powell to speak at the university.

In the summer of 1969, Gormley hitchhikes to Istanbul with a friend, then onwards through Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to India, and finally to Kathmandu, where he is moved by the Swayambhunath Stupa. The following summer, Gormley hitchhikes to Istanbul once more and explores the remains of Lycia in south-western Turkey, before travelling on to Syria, the temples of Baalbek in Lebanon, and finally sailing to Egypt. The huge stone burial boxes of the sacred Apis bulls at Saqqara, the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, and the Great Pyramid of Giza all leave the deepest impression. At the Great Pyramid, he spends an hour lying in the sarcophagus within the King’s Chamber.

Gormley travels back to England and completes his degree.

1971 – 1974

Gormley returns to India via the same overland route as 1969, spending five months in Afghanistan visiting the ancient cities of Mazar-i-Sharif, Balkh, and Kunduz, and taking time to sit on the head of the great Buddhas at Bamiyan, gazing out over the barley fields below. Months in Pakistan are spent exploring the northern valleys of Swat and Kaghan, the Kalash Valleys in Chitral, and the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro. The bold colour and cursive line of the Indian miniature collection at the Lahore Museum inspire him.

He reaches India in 1972 and, in Dalhousie, decides to study Vipassana meditation with S.N. Goenka – an experience he regards as the most transformative of his life. Under Goenka’s guidance, Gormley learns to experience the body as a sensate zone or place.

He travels widely in India and Sri Lanka, visiting and receiving teachings from Rajneesh, Neem Karoli Baba, Sai Baba, Anandamayi Ma, and Jiddu Krishnamurti, as well as the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. He visits the holy sites of Varanasi, Sarnath, Bodh Gaya, Arunachala, Madurai, Bhubaneswar, Auroville, and Mount Abu.

The Gopis’ dancing platforms in the forest of Nidhivan, the monumental three-headed sculpture of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva carved from the living rock of the Elephanta Caves, the celestial apsaras painted at Sigiriya, the reclining Buddha hewn into the cliff face at Polonnaruwa, and the Pallava sculptures and architecture at Mahabalipuram all leave their mark on his imagination.

In Kalimpong, he is taught Chinese brush drawing by Shen, a Chinese refugee – an activity that deepens his commitment to making art.

1974 – 1975

Returning to London, Gormley enrols at the Central School of Art and Design, where he learns metal casting and begins making experimental works in clay and found materials. He makes Sleeping Place (1974), for which he drapes a plaster-soaked sheet over the body of a friend; the hardened shell evokes the people he saw sleeping on streets and in railway stations throughout India, covered by thin cotton saris or dhotis. With his friend John Levinson, he transforms an artist commune and squat on King’s Cross Road into a studio, working there for the next six years alongside around twenty fellow artists.

1975 – 1977

He transfers to Goldsmiths’ College, London, where his tutors include Michael Kenny, Ivor Roberts-Jones, Michael Craig-Martin, and Richard Wentworth, as well as visiting tutor Martin Naylor, who becomes a mentor. During the summer breaks, he works on a farm in the Brecon Beacons, Wales, where he experiments with making large outdoor works in concrete. He sees Walter Pichler’s 1977 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and is struck by Bed (1971), made of lead and glass, and how Pichler’s works engage with architecture.

Following graduation, Gormley and his brother Michael travel to Ireland to explore its rich prehistory, visiting Newgrange, the Hill of Uisneach, and the Turoe Stone, a Celtic omphalos. From the rugged coastline of Connemara, he brings back a granite stone that he will later encase in lead, forming the core of Land Sea and Air I (1977–79). He later describes this sculpture as the foundation of his work.

SELECTED ARTWORKS

Sculpture

Open Door (1975)

Goldsmiths Work II (1976)

Mace (1977)

First Hole (1977)

Broken Spiral (1977)

Temporary Action Cave Mouth (1977)

CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY

Holding a white stone in my hand I feel its smoothness polished by time, its weight pulling to ground and wonder at the length of its past from the time when it was part of the liquid core – fire of the earth cooled, cracked off and made its journey through the elements to continue on long after this encounter. This essay is not about geology but about man’s relationship to stone. About why this relationship is the oldest, the firmest and perhaps the deepest of all man’s relationships with the phenomenal world beyond bodies. The continuum of the life of the stone being so much less short-lived than man’s, its progeny and purpose both more obvious and more obscure than the human have led to this relationship which takes so many forms but is based on the veneration of the old and everlasting and the eternal.

I am writing this essay in order to ask questions about man’s attitude to the world and the ways in which he seeks to express it. At the Me[e]nakshi [T]emple in Madurai, South India, the stone is worshipped. The stone is at its centre, in darkness, alone. To the world the temple presents its four great outer gateways hundreds of feet high, where brightly coloured sculptures depicting all the avatars and deities of the Hindu [cosmology] dance against the sky. There are tanks where the pilgrim[s] take their ritual bath and anoint their foreheads with the Bindu – mark of the [Shaivite]. There are highly coloured images of Ganesha, Lord Rama and Parvati covered in silks and cloths being paraded round the outer precinct with trumpets, gongs and drums. Here the images and the worshippers meet in colour, light, in sun. Entering the inner precinct however, we lose the sun, we have penetrated a subterranean world – it is hotter, the smell of the burning oil lamps and incense sticks fills the still air. It is damp, hollow and dark – a final circuit round the central shrine and then we come to venerate at the shrine of the first cause. Here there are no sculptures, no [Apsaras], only a smooth black stone seated in a holed base, anointed and shining. The heat is thick and there is the smell of decomposing flowers. The stone pulses a deep rhythm both magnetic and repulsive. There is no doubt as to its effect.

To apply aesthetics to the experience of this primal energy would be as meaningless as it would be to ask ‘why that stone?’ The fact was that that stone had been chosen and placed. The stone and the place had drawn people for 2000 years and it was charged by a living presence that was fed by the constant stream of visitors who pledged their own lives to this force. What I was witnessing was the simplest and most direct experience that man has with his god and there is no doubt that the stone responded. The strength of this experience lies in an uncomplicated and intuitive encounter with the sacred. A shrine where the human subject to change meets an image of permanence. Knowing it strengthened the individual’s sense of his own identity and the sense of power outside himself which needs to be propitiated in order to ensure some measure of relief from the ‘floating world’. Here we are not dealing with formal convention nor with the symbolic but with the real. As man becomes more ‘civilised’ so he becomes more egotistical and makes his gods in his own ‘image’ and thus travels further and further from the reality of the divine in all things.

1977 – 1979

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1980

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1981

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1982

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1983

Gormley shows lead body-case works in three major group exhibitions in London and abroad, alongside his contemporaries, including Alison Wilding, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, and Tony Cragg.

As a result of showing at the Venice Biennale, Gormley is invited by Rosenthal to create a limited-edition artwork. He designs a set of dinner plates with the body’s major organs imposed in black porcelain on a white porcelain ground. It is unrealised. He sells his first two works to American collectors Carol and Arthur Goldberg, meets Knud W. Jensen of Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, who expresses a deep connection with the work, and is approached by the gallerist Salvatore Ala, who offers to represent him in the US.

Stuart Morgan is commissioned to write a catalogue essay for the exhibition ‘Transformations: New Sculpture from Britain’ at the XVII Bienal de São Paulo and sheds light on the processes of revelation and insulation at the core of Gormley’s practice, as well as its anthropological resonance.

In the summer, Gormley carves Still Falling (1983) into a cliff face at Tout Quarry on the Isle of Portland, Dorset, and in the autumn, he is included in a survey of new art at the Tate Gallery, London. Gormley insists on showing Box (1983) close to the gallery’s toilets, wishing to reinforce its connections to daily life.

A solo exhibition at Coracle Press in London establishes Gormley’s commitment to working directly from life, using his own body as subject, tool, and material. He considers his contribution to sculpture not as a form of representation but as an index of where a body once was and where any body could be. Two works from the exhibition – Untitled (Sleeping Figure) (1983) and Untitled (Listening Figure) (1983) – are reunited over four decades later in ‘Witness: Early Lead Works’ at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

‘The Sculpture Show’ (two-venue exhibition): Hayward Gallery, London; Serpentine Gallery, London, 13 August – 9 October 1983 (group; exh. cat.)

New Art’, Tate Gallery, London, 14 September – 23 October 1983 (group; exh. cat.)

Antony Gormley’, Coracle Press, London, 7 October – 5 November 1983 (solo)

‘Transformations: New Sculpture from Britain’ (touring): XVII Bienal de São Paulo; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 14 October 1983 – 1984, specific dates unknown (group; exh. cat.)

SELECTED ARTWORKS

Permanent Work

Still Falling (1983)

Sculpture

Three Places (1983)

Untitled (Sleeping Figure) (1983)

Untitled (Listening Figure) (1983)

Desert (for Walter) (1983)

Box (1983)

Blanket Drawing I (1983)

Drawing

Threshold (1983)

Venture (1983)

CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY

In Antony Gormley’s work existence itself mediates between perception and truth. Inherent in his objects is a mystery which unwrapping fails to dispel and insulation only heightens. Mercilessly flayed or hermetically sealed, they resemble units from some black-hole universe where matter has been turned inside-out. Stripping and extension, the adding and subtracting of skins is so persistent a feature that it is tempting to decide that it is absence, not presence, to which he renders homage. Spectators are invited to witness a continuous drama of disclosure and concealment in which (paradoxically) nothing is hidden, nothing revealed.

The most enigmatic of Gormley’s early sculptures, Open Door [1975], a door hanging in mid-air, looks like an object lesson. More like a window, it can be seen through; it has been sliced lengthways into equal strips, then each strip turned through 90 [degrees] and laid flat. Instead of using items from everyday life or composing with abstract elements, Gormley abstracts from mundane items, situating them in some middle ground. Modification of context becomes characteristic. In Bread Line [1979], which he calls a ‘redescription’, a loaf of bread is spread across the floor one bite at a time. For Flat Tree [1978], he has cut the trunk of a conifer into slices of equal thickness. Then, starting with the smallest, the pieces have been laid in a spiral so that they touch. The distance from centre to periphery of the work, the totality looking like a trunk formation of its own, constitutes something equivalent to a map of the growth of the tree. A new tree has come into existence.

Relocation, rearrangement, redescription… The artist draws the material to him, makes it relate to his own concerns, then sets it free once more after a gesture of ‘making strange’ […] Unlike Pygmalion, urging matter into his own image, Gormley – more mortal than demigod – can be seen as an Adamic figure adrift in a new world, finding ways to cope with the fullness and particularity of existence.

1984 – 1985 – 1986- 1987 – 1988 – 1989 – 1990

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1991

American Field is exhibited at Salvatore Ala Gallery in New York before embarking on an extensive tour across the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Also in the US, Gormley receives an invitation from curator Mary Jane Jacob to create new works for the group exhibition ‘Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art in Charleston’. The exhibition debuts two significant installations: Host (1991), a room flooded with mud and seawater, and Learning to Think (1991), five lead figures each with their heads lost in the ceiling. While installing the exhibition, he shares an apartment with French artist Christian Boltanski, who becomes a friend.

The artist’s brother, Michael, takes a pint of blood from Gormley, which Gormley then uses to make a series of drawings depicting brains, bodies, microbial fields, and family relations.

He begins a partnership with gallerist Claes Nordenhake and exhibits recent work at his galleries in Stockholm and Cologne.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

‘Antony Gormley’, Galerie Christine et Isy Brachot, Brussels, 16 January – 2 March 1991 (solo) ‘Antony Gormley: Drawings and Etchings’, Frith Street Gallery, London, 24 January – 2 March 1991 (solo)

‘Field’, Salvatore Ala Gallery, New York, 23 March – 27 April 1991 (solo)

‘Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art in Charleston’, Spoleto Festival, Charleston, 24 May – 4 August 1991 (group; exh. cat.)

‘Inheritance and Transformation’, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 25 May – 29 September 1991 (group; exh. cat.)

‘Sculpture’, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, 5 September – 5 October 1991 (solo)

‘Antony Gormley: Field and Other Figures’, Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, 22 September – 1 December 1991 (solo; exh. cat.)

‘Sculpture’, Miller Nordenhake, Cologne, November 1991, specific dates unknown (solo)

SELECTED ARTWORKS

Sculpture

Learning to See I (1991)

Instrument I (1991)

American Field (1991)

Cord (1991)

Three Bodies (1991)

Host (1991)

Learning to Think (1991)

Sense (1991)

Immersion (1991)

Shift (1991)

Drawing

Commune (1991)

Baobab (1991)

Over (1991)

Dome (1991)

Gravitational Osmosis (1991)

CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY

Antony Gormley’s works reflect and embody a tragic paradox. The artist’s response to questions of human survival and the meaning of life, they are both passionate and reticent. As with the poetry of Sophocles, currents of tumultuous feeling swirl beneath a serene and composed surface, reflecting a duality inherent in the human condition. Underneath the cold surface of lead is the heat of a human body threatened with immolation: faced with this conflict, the work attempts to mediate between oceanic feeling and finite form. The life size lead figures for which Gormley is primarily known float on that ocean with a hopefulness that belies their impending mortality. The work posits the reality of a kind of universal soul which can be encountered only through the body; while it transcends and survives the body, it is still somehow dependent upon it for self-realisation. It is this that is threatened in the tidal sense of historical endgame that has engulfed human destiny in this century, and that is the underlying subject of Gormley’s work.

In [American] Field [1991], the centrepiece of the present exhibition, 35,000 small terracotta figurines, roughly hand-modelled and baked in a brick kiln in Mexico, totally occupy an exhibition space, leaving no room for the viewer, who gazes at them from a doorway. Loosely composed like pebbles left by high tide on a beach – and, also like pebbles, each slightly different from all the others – the hand-sized figures gaze upward at the viewer in a way that is expectant rather than accusatory, as if awaiting some summons or announcement. Their eyes, black holes dug into the clay, are startlingly alive; staring upward, they stand out starkly against the terracotta. Their surfaces vary in darkness depending on how near to the fire each figure lay in the kiln. The resulting marks are parts of their identity, their skin roasted and darkened by the fire, while a luminescence retained from it glows as if from underneath. They are almost solarised, burned by passing through the sun and retaining something of its glow and heat. Yet they come from deep within the earth, from beneath the visible surface of things.

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Field represents a radical change in Gormley’s work, in its reduction in scale of the figures, elimination of the artist’s body from the process and with it the element of lead, and vast proliferation in number of figures. The terracotta figurines, seemingly connected with the primacy of consciousness and hence associated with a hopeful prognostication of the future, represent a new era of feeling. The half-formed tiny beings never challenge the legitimacy of the leaden giants they are replacing, but offer themselves to the world with a greater intimacy and warmth. Field is a place of feeling, a place for the feeling of the future.

Thomas McEvilley, ‘Seeds of the Future: The Art of Antony Gormley’, in the exhibition guide for Antony Gormley: Field and Other Figures (Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 1991), pp. 7–13

1992

Gormley starts work on another ‘Field’ installation at the invitation of the Goethe Institut, collaborating with adults and children from a caboclo community in Porto Velho, Brazil. The resulting work, Amazonian Field (1992), comprises approximately 24,000 clay figures and is exhibited in ‘Arte Amazonas’, a group exhibition coinciding with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Attending the summit, Gormley observes the tribal parliament, where he hears discussions about land incursions between the Yupik of the far north and the Kayapó of the Brazilian rainforest. He also attends talks by environmental activists, including Stewart Brand, David Suzuki, and Vandana Shiva.

He explores the Madeira River with Bill Woodrow, inspired by the vitality of the forest and river, the freshwater dolphins, and the parrots, but troubled by the violence and devastation wrought by gold mining and drug trafficking along its banks. He meets artists Julião Sarmento and Marina Abramović, who become friends.

As a result of being asked to contribute to the ‘Sculpture in the Close’ exhibition at Jesus College, University of Cambridge, Gormley strikes up a friendship with archaeologist and paleolinguist Colin Renfrew. He makes Learning to Be I (1992), a figure buried to

its ankles, echoing his own experience at Carnac, and sites it next to a plane tree brought in the early nineteenth century from the site of the Battle of Thermopylae. The dialogue between Gormley and Renfrew finds lasting expression in Renfrew’s book Figuring It Out (2003), for which Gormley provides the cover image.

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CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY

If late modernist painting conflated the figure and the ground in the interests of a single unequivocal surface, I propose that the body is the ground and that at the other side of appearance is a space far greater than the space against which, traditionally, the body is figured. If Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk [by] the Sea is a Rothko with a man in it, I am trying to make a case for a man containing the boundless space of consciousness.

I know all of this is in profound opposition to the post-modern sign-reading, language oriented currencies, but I hope neither in any nostalgic nor negative way. Perhaps I feel that the world out there is getting pretty good at interpreting itself as we are sold images of ourselves from soaps on television to knitwear ads on the street and I want to explore something else – it’s as if the sophistication of culture feeding on culture has left Being out.

Being is rather a vague term. What I am asking is rather than Being engaged with acting in the world, is it possible to express consciousness with no object but itself? Being contained in the body and its feelings, Being conveyed as immersion, where questions of culture become irrelevant.

We have long considered art objects as things in the world. Minimal self-referentiality has been replaced by an enjoyment of judging an object’s relation to other objects. In a deconstructive world, art objects have become part of deconstructing process and a reflection of the plurality of languages and the relativism of value.

I still like the essentialising tendency of modernism because it is a way of feeling more alive. The problem with it was that it all got channelled into finding an objective formal language. I propose an absolute subjectivity allowing existence to become the material, subject and generating principle of art. This is an essentialising process but turned towards internal balance and survival; towards intrinsic value.

This exhibition brings together two works Body and Soul: a series of nine etchings which I made between February and September 1990, and the sculpture Learning to See [I] made in 1991. They are both works that evoke the deep space of the interior of the body. In the sculpture for the first time I have kept the lead-covered mould very close to my body and indicated the eyes looking within. I hope its held breath conveys a feeling of the infinity that consciousness inhabits and that you feel included in it. The etchings (my first) try to express touch as gravity made conscious and gravity as the attraction that binds us to the earth. The five dark plates are impressions of the five main orifices: a vision of the inner realm of the body irradiated by the light and energy of what Blake called ‘the windows of the soul’.

West Wittering

Out to sea, drawn by the openness of the light, the pools of moving water, the sight of people moving half buried in shimmeringlight. […] There is an easy way to walk in water, knee deep; you have to move slowly and allow the legs to bend and fall with their own weight, it leads to dreaminess, to be[ing] held by the resistance, held by the light, the realm of sea, cries of sea-birds diving and gliding low over the water[,] the sand bottom that becomes softer. Funnelled and then contoured by the lapping of the receding tide and brushed by the wind. Into the deeper bits another time, and then a last walk across an empty bar of sand to the wreck, lying in its own hole of bottle green water, the engine and boiler visible, the rudder spar, signalling across the water to another collection of rusted buckled ribs, that mark the prow of the ship, facing the waves, a fine, old strange thing, covered in anemones, sponge and weed. The light to sea was silver and blue and bleached. Turning around the colours and frippery of the human coast seemed petty and tawdry. The big grey-back birds and Arctic terns and oystercatchers and sandpipers were catching the light, white against the sea. What lovely crashing, silver, skiing, bleached forms in the air these birds are. On the way home, past the wheat field, crisply singing in the wind and whispering.

 

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2013

Gormley receives the Praemium Imperiale award from the Japan Art Association.

Three exhibitions in Europe chart ongoing developments in Gormley’s work: geometric configurations of the body, both solid and porous, at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, and Middelheim Museum, Antwerp; and explorations of mass and expansion at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg.

Gormley returns to Copenhagen Editions to create a new series of prints that emerge from his recent architectural concerns and drawings made in London and New York during the mid-1990s. The prints examine two central themes – body and space – and investigate the implications of distance, the arbitrary nature of measurement systems, and the disorientation that occurs when conventional relationships between ground, sky, horizon, and architecture are disrupted.

A sailing trip with his brother Michael and son Guy across the Atlantic, from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, returns Gormley to childhood memories of the rowing boat he sailed in Sussex. Days spent surrounded by nothing but sea and sky evoke the elemental encounters that have shaped his practice.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

‘Firmament and Other Forms’, Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, 24 February – 5 May 2013 (solo; exh. cat.)

‘According to a Given Mean’, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, 28 March – 4 May 2013 (solo; exh. cat.)

‘Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain’ (touring): Southampton Art Gallery; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; Mead Gallery, University of Warwick; Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 10 May 2013 – 15 June 2014 (group; exh. cat.)

 ‘Meter’, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Salzburg, 18 May – 15 July 2013 (solo; exh. cat.)

‘On Nature’, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, 28 June – 2 August 2013 (group)

SELECTED ARTWORKS

Permanent Work

Another Time XVI (2013)

Another Time XX (2013)

Cinch (2013)

Sculpture Big Ward (2013)

Manifold (2013)

Gut XI (2013)

Frame (2013)

Place (2013)

Form (2013)

Drawing A Given Mean I (2013)

Manifold I (2013)

Print Series

‘Copenhagen Editions’ (2013)

CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY

Between cell and cosmos, at a scale related to the human body, is the realm of human habitation, and it is here, in the equation of our spatial condition with that of architecture, that ‘Meter’ brings all these concerns together: ‘We are minds enclosed in bodies and our bodies are enclosed in architecture’. In a very early work, Room, in 1980, Gormley reconfigured a set of his own clothes (his ‘second skin’) shredded fine and strung in lines around a square to describe the space of the body conceived as a room. Room II, a concrete work of 1987, presented architecture as pure geometry, a hollow cube, a maximum compression, the minimum space necessary for the body. The notion of confinement and security held simultaneously in these sculptures – the constricting containment of architecture and the boundless freedom afforded by internal space – is a pervasive dialectic present in every form of Gormley’s alliance of body with building, sculpture with architecture. It was present in the large scale installation Allotment II of 1996, a room-sized field of concrete encasements of personal space ranged to form a sort of urban grid to be explored, moved through. It is there in Breathing Room [I, 2006], in Model [2012], the body-building, and in his collaborative project (with architect David Chipperfield) in Kivik, Sweden, [A] Sculpture for the Subjective Experience of Architecture, in 2008.

All these are, essentially, environments, incorporating the viewer’s body in architecture. For the last decade and more, Gormley has developed, alongside, a genealogy of works in discrete series – the most recent displayed in ‘Meter’ – that construct the form of the body itself in the ‘language of architecture’: the block, the box, the rod, the frame. The earliest of these, from 2001, described the body surface – its ‘skin’ – with a loose or tight grid of steel blocks of identical size – as a basic unit, like a cell, or a solid pixel. From 2003, Gormley began to work with a canon of blocks (four, and then six) of similar proportion but multiplied volume, and to construct figures as mass rather than following their surface form or filling a body void, as before. He proceeded according to the structural logic of building itself – of load and support – propping and stacking, balancing and cantilevering blocks, seeking an equation between the expressive language of body posture and the rigour of geometric architectural form, pushing the body to the point of abstraction and aiming for the greatest economy of means, the minimum number of elements to describe each form. This led to a crucial step – to a finding of body form with blocks of irregular size, which carried their own individual form and logic, positioned to describe the body rather than filling the designated space of a body mould with a regular set of volumes. This significant development was made possible when the laborious procedure of casting the original pose from the artist’s body gave way to a sophisticated process of digital body scanning and design.

In recent years one series after another has extended the range of methods and materials, using iron, steel and (now) plaster, in the form of blocks, elongated beams, geometric rods and open ‘space frames’, in an extensive probing of the potential of the ‘dialectic of mass and space’, on terrain where sculptural and architectural first principles intersect. The influential German architect and theorist Gottfried Semper, in 1862, observed a distinction between the two basic procedures of building: the ‘tectonics’ of the frame, the spatial matrix of linear components, and the ‘stereotomics’ of the earthwork, the stacking of solid, load-bearing units. Kenneth Frampton, adopting these terms in a consideration of the ‘poetics of construction’, characterises this distinction: ‘framework tends towards the aerial and dematerialisation of mass, whereas the mass form is telluric, embedding itself deeper in the earth. One tends toward the light and the other toward dark. These gravitational opposites… may be said to symbolise the two cosmological opposites to which they aspire; the sun and the earth.’ This polarity of principle and form is acknowledged, and redeployed, in the contrasting open matrices of the ‘Frame Works’ – like Place [2013], for instance – and the weighty, earthbound cast-iron solids of a work such as [Big] Ward [2013].

To this complex interplay of forces Gormley has added, increasingly in recent years – and particularly here, in ‘Meter’ – the ‘game of scale’. The rhythmic relation of human scale/ sculptural scale/environmental scale has always been crucial to sculptors’ intentions and sculpture’s effect, whether or not within an architectural ‘frame’: Michelangelo’s David, originally intended to be sited on the roof of the Duomo in Florence, is five metres tall; Giacometti proposed figures of a height of around eight metres for his (unrealised) 1959 project for Chase Manhattan Plaza in New York. But Gormley, in this exhibition, engages scale, expansion and enlargement in two different ways, and to radically different formal and emotional effect. The ‘Blockworks’ and plaster figures exhibited here are, you could say, ‘straightforward’ enlargements, scaled up to one and a half or two times life-size, or reduced to half-size, retaining a measurable relation to our own bodies. The geometry and proportions of these abstracted figures, and of their solid or transparent elements, remain unchanged. The works are still self-evidently ‘figural’, despite their enlargement: they hold their outward form and the internal dynamic of their posture as they stand, sit or lie. […]

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[…] ‘Meter’ throws us back on ourselves, our dreaming of vastnesses, our experience of the spaces we inhabit and move around in, the particular sensations aroused in us by these space-consuming sculptures. The rigour, the blankness and the reluctance of some of the work to encourage emotional identification with it – the refusal of abstraction to invite empathy – may be a challenge, even a provocation on the artist’s part, but ultimately what is demonstrated here is an expression of potential, a refusal to accept the containment of scale or the limitations of our imagining of it. […]

Martin Caiger-Smith, ‘Larger Than Life’, in Meter (Salzburg: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 2013), pp. 23–32

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