MY MAGICAL ATTIC: ANTONY GORMLEY: SECOND BODY AT GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC PARIS

ANTONY GORMLEY: SECOND BODY AT GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC PARIS

March 1, 2015 - July 18, 2015

ANTONY GORMLEY: SECOND BODY AT GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC PARIS

March 1, 2015 - July 18, 2015

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is delighted to host a major exhibition of sculptures by Antony Gormley in the vast halls of the gallery space in Pantin. The exhibition continues the artist’s investigation of body and space, interrogating the body as place and architecture as the primary conditioner of our experience of space. Antony Gormley fully exploits the scale and volumes of the former foundry sheds that now form the gallery, catalysing our experience of space and time through works that either constitute or are arranged as “fields”. In a recent statement, the artist

describes being “increasingly interested in the tropes of framing, containing and constructing being freed from architecture’s shelter function… to make a psychological architecture that allows surface and mass, light and dark, open and closed volumes free play in works that become places for an adventure in real time.”

The first work in the exhibition and the sole occupant of the first gallery is a four-metre-high model of a house as a body. This work objectifies and internalises the relationship between a perceiving human body and its habitat by mining and perforating the normally closed bodyvolumes using the languages of cells, corridors, shafts and windows, presenting the subjective body as a mansion of many chambers.

This idea of the transmutation of the anatomical body into interconnected cells is continued in the second gallery space with the installation Expansion Field. The sixty sculptures that constitute this piece are arranged in four rows; a totalised environment constructed in Corten steel sheet from expansions of over twenty fundamental body poses. Each work has been evolved by applying regular increments of expansion to each of the constituent cells of a particular body stack. Together the group of sculptures form a field similar in appearance to the repeated units of a minimalist installation or the rows of megaliths at Carnac.

In the largest and highest space in the exhibition another field is installed. Here, well over lifesize cast iron stelae immerse viewers in a forest of totemic presence, in which they are invited to intuit somatic gestalts evoking a variety of emotions, from resistance to delirium.

The final work in the exhibition, Matrix II, is made specifically for the fourth space of the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin. It is virtual architecture, a three-dimensional drawing that identifies sixteen room-sized volumes that interconnect around a void space equivalent to two adjacent standing bodies. Using re-enforcing mesh, the skeleton of cast-concrete buildings, Matrix II interrogates the form and structure of the human habitat. This work reveals itself to the gaze of an ambulatory visitor and invites visual penetration, while denying physical access. The challenge of distinguishing foreground, mid-ground and background in the multiple layers of

mesh is a vertiginous optical task. As the viewer circulates around the work it creates a disorientating perceptual field in which figure/ground relations become inverted and the accelerating effects of compressed perspective confuses the eye.

The effect of each of these works displayed through the four halls in Pantin is to disorientate the viewers and invite them on a journey of auto-observation. Second Body is a continuation of the artist's conception of the exhibition as a physical and psychological test site.

A bilingual catalogue in English and French with texts by the American choreographer William Forsythe, the art historian Guitemie Maldonado and a conversation between Antony Gormley and Hans Ulrich Obrist will be published to accompany the exhibition.

http://ropac.net/exhibition/second-body

You may reach Antony Gormley’s interview with Pierre Tillet and past exhibitions news at Zentrum Paul Klee, Gallery Andersson Stockholm, White Cube Gallery Hong Kong, Xavier Hufkens Gallery and Middelheim Museum to click below links.

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

http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2014/11/antony-gormley-expansion-field-at.html

http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2014/09/antony-gormley-meet-at-gallery.html

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

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

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

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

SECOND BODY
Installation View, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin, France
Photograph by Charles Duprat

BIG FALL 2014

Cast Iron

Dimensions: 297 x 74 x 67,5

‘’ The installation celebrates the infinity of the imagination experienced in the darkness
of the body and in the sky at night. ‘’

Antony Gormley

SMALL ACHE V - 2013

Cast Iron

Dimensions: 83 x 27,5 x 34,5

SECOND BODY
Installation View, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin, France
Photograph by Charles Duprat

SMALL STOP 2013

Cast Iron

Dimensions: 26,5 x 23 x 40

SECOND BODY
Installation View, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin, France
Photograph by Charles Duprat

HOLE 2014

HOLE, 2014
8 mm Corten Steel
Dimensions: 365 x 241 x 310 cm
Installation View SECOND BODY Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin, France
Photograph by Charles Duprat

BIG SPACE 2014

Cast Iron

Dimensions: 311,5 x 69 x 55,5

BIG GUT II AND EXPANSION FIELD, 2014
Installation View SECOND BODY Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin, France
Photograph by Charles Duprat

VIEW FROM ANTONY GORMLEY'S STUDIO

SECOND BODY, GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC, PARIS PANTIN, FRANCE, 2015

In SECOND BODY, the four main halls of the gallery become different zones of experience that relate to each other, hopefully creating an experience greater than the sum of its parts. On entering the first space one encounters STOP, a work made of 14 solid lead blocks which consciously reflects the history of the building. All of the blocks are presented in dynamic relation to one another and their combined dead load allows them to cohere into a single body form. STOP initiates the theme of the 'second body' where anatomy gives way to architecture, and the body is translated into the masses and voids of the built environment.
By being so much smaller than life-size, STOP also sets in motion a concern with scale that runs throughout the exhibition. At the other end of this first gallery space is a much larger than life-size work of a crouching figure with a body that becomes hollow. HOLE is a mansion of many chambers purposefully facing the opposite direction, encouraging the viewer to circum navigate and view the work from the far side. What was solid, dark matter in the first work is translated here into a subtle interplay between light and shade. The side of the work first facing you as you enter invites you to look within the square void in its back and appreciate the light running through it; a corridor to the heart of the work. HOLE suggests that the singular body can also be a model for the collective body, where the interlocking cells mirror the way sites within a city interpenetrate each other.

Having established this dialectic of scale and of mass and void, where architecture replaces anatomy, these themes are carried further in the galleries to the left and to the right of the entrance hall. Immediately to the left is EXPANSION FIELD, a work made of sixty sculptures of different sizes which the viewer is invited to walk through. Here, differing scale is not the result of proportional enlargement of human form but of incremental expansion through applying the terms of the cosmological constant: here, the expansion of cosmic space is applied to the subjective condition of the individual. The installation celebrates the infinity of the imagination experienced in the darkness of the body and in the sky at night.
In the third and largest space there is a relational field of dark, unstable columns. Here are 16 larger than life-size anaerobic, black oxide iron blockworks each weighing over two tonnes. I hope that the passage of the viewer and their empathetic projection are drawn towards these stacked, propped, cantilevered masses which may seem at first cold and forbidding but in spite of, or perhaps because of their reticence, contain feeling. This is all difficult stuff to articulate but my sense is that as the work gets more brutal in its geometry, it is able to be more telling in its emotional range.
To the right of the entrance hall is MATRIX II, the largest single work in the exhibition. Sixteen room-scaled volumes made in reinforced steel mesh interpenetrate, identifying a void space equivalent to two bodies. This is the materialisation of perspective, the phenomenon which, in the 15th century Italy, gave rise to the pictorial control of space. In MATRIX II, perspective is used to destroy perspective. This materialised grid system gives a great sense of disorientation. As you are drawn by these push-pull perspectives and as you walk around the piece, the impossibility of reconciling foreground, mid-ground and background and the absence of any figure within this ground undermine any certainty of the stability of architecture itself.
I have attempted to use the space of the gallery as a foil against which the themes of body and architecture are played out in four distinct 'field' experiences. The exhibition becomes a test site for the auto-observation of the viewer's own sense of mass, scale and movement in time and space.
Antony Gormley, London, 12 February 2015

EXPANSION FIELD AND BIG SPIN, 2014
Installation View SECOND BODY Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin, France
Photograph by Charles Duprat

EXPANSION FIELD, 2014
4 mm Corten Steel
60 elements; Variable Dimensions
Installation View SECOND BODY Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin, France
Photograph by Charles Duprat

EXPANSION FIELD, 14/60, 2014

4 mm Corten Steel

Dimensions: 199.8 x 56.9 x 50.1 cm

Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris/Salzburg

Photograph by Jürgen Brinkmann

EXPANSION FIELD 40/60 - 2014

4 mm. Corten Steel

Dimensions: 201 x 59,9 x 60,3

EXPANSION FIELD, 2014
4 mm Corten Steel
60 elements; Variable Dimensions
Installation View SECOND BODY Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin, France
Photograph by Charles Duprat

Digital rendering of Antony Gormley’s Matrix II - 2014

MATRIX II, 2014
6 mm Mild Steel Reinforcing Mesh
Installation View SECOND BODY Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin, France
Photograph by Charles Duprat

TRIAL, 2013
Cast Iron
Dimensions: 192 x 62 x 52 cm
Installation View SECOND BODY Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin, France
Photograph by Charles Duprat

ANTONY GORMLEY

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950 and received a degree from Trinity College, Cambridge in Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Art. Upon completing his undergraduate studies, he travelled for three years in India before returning to enrol in London’s Central School of Art, Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize in 1999, was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1997 and has been a Royal Academician since 2003. In 2011 he received the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance in recognition of his set for Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Babel. In 2013 he received the Praemium Imperiale and in 2014 he was made Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for Services to the Arts.

Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Rio di Janeiro and Brasilia (2012); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2012); The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1993) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (1989). He has also participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale (1982 and 1986) and Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany (1987).

The notable current exhibitions of Gormley’s works are Expansion Field, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (until 11 January 2015); Sesostris III: A Legendary Pharaoh, Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille, France (until 25 January 2015) and Sculpture 21st: Antony Gormley, Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany (until 1 February 2015). In May 2015 the exhibition Land will take place at various sites in the United Kingdom and it will be visible for one year.

http://ropac.net/exhibition/second-body

PAGES

March 24, 2015

ANTONY GORMLEY: SECOND BODY AT GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC PARIS