ANTONY GORMLEY: LEARNING TO BE. AT SCHAUWERK SINDELFINGEN
ANTONY GORMLEY: LEARNING TO BE. AT
SCHAUWERK SINDELFINGEN
June 13, 2021 – April 24, 2022
From 13 June 2021, the SCHAUWERK
Sindelfingen will present a comprehensive solo exhibition of works by the
internationally acclaimed British sculptor Antony Gormley (b 1950, London), the
most significant survey of the artist’s work ever to take place in Germany.
Gormley is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, recipient of the
Turner Prize and the Praemium Imperiale. The presentation will bring together
over 20 sculptures from the artist's studio as well as the Schaufler
collection, including works on view to the public for the first time.
Gormley continually tries to identify
the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and
feelings can arise. The central subject of his work is the human being’s
relation to space and time. Using his own body as material, tool and subject,
he makes evocations of a variety of states: exposure, isolation, emergence and
growth, all evidenced in this exhibition. Early works such as the FLAT TREE
(1978) and ONE APPLE (1982), show Gormley's interest in time and how its
duration can be revealed.
Some of the works are encased, others
are more open and permeable. The continual questioning of where a body begins
and ends is investigated in sculptures that evolve from void to mass, line to
plane, rectilinear to organic form and structure: from the almost weightless
linear "drawing in space“ of FLARE II (2008), through the dense mass of,
LOSS III (2012), via the room-sized enclosed darkness of HOLD (2016).). Three
large-scale architectonic works, ROOM (1980), HOLD (2016) and MURMUR (2014),
take centre stage, mediating between the individual space of the body and the
collective space through the agency of all forms of shelter, from clothes to
architecture.
After the project was postponed last
year due to the pandemic, the artist is thrilled about its implementation as
from June 2021: "I'm delighted to be making this exhibition in the
distinctive former industrial buildings of the SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen with its
spacious and open rooms, filled with natural light from above."
The exhibition forefronts Gormley’s
transformation of sculpture from purely material and formal issues into an
exploration of life itself. “Its subject is as much to do with our own bodies
and their relationship to the sculptures as it is to do with the works
themselves: the body as a container, as an energy field, as an aggregate of
parts, as a provisional stack, as a mass, as a neural network.”
https://www.schauwerk-sindelfingen.de/en/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/detail_15104.html
You may reach Antony
Gormley’s exhibitions news at , Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris,
Zentrum Paul Klee, Gallery Andersson Stockholm, White Cube Gallery Hong Kong,
Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Middelheim Museum and general news to click below
links.
https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2013/12/british-artist-antony-gormley.html
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2015/03/antony-gormley-second-body-at-galerie.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
INSTALLATION VIEW
ANTONY GORMLEY - LEARNING TO BE
SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen, 2021,
Photography by Frank Kleinbach,
© The Artist
CUMULATE (BREATHE II), 2018,
Lead,
Dimension: 271 x 125 x 124 cm,
© The Artist
Photograph by Stephen White, London
BREAD LINE,
1979 / 2021
Bread
Dimension: 1 x 15,000 x 3 cm
© The
Artist, Collection
of the Artist
FLARE II, 2008
2 mm Square Section
Stainless Steel Bar
Dimension: 300 x 210 x 216 cm
© The
Artist, Collection
of the Artis
MURMUR, 2014,
20 mm Square Section Stained Stainless Steel
Sube and Plastic Spigots,
Dimension: 420,5 x 430 x 411 cm,
Courtesy Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, London, Paris,
Salzburg,
© The Artist
Photograph by Stephen White, London
INSIDER V, 1998,
Cast Iron,
Dimension: 194,5 x 51 x 28 cm,
SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen,
© Antony Gormley,
HOLD, 2016
6 mm Weathering Steel and
Air
Dimension: 295 x 274 x 278 cm
© The Artist, Collection of the Artist
FLAT TREE, 1978
Larch Wood
Dimension: 678 cm,
© The Artist
ONE APPLE,
1982
Apples, Lead and Air
Dimension: 7 x 1,110 x 7 cm
© The Artist, Collection of the Artist
FOOTPATH,
1980/2021
A Pair of Boots
Dimension: 4 x 30 x 1,190 cm
© The Artist, Collection of the Artist
THE SCHAUWERK SINDELFINGEN MUSEUM
ROOM, 1980
Socks, Shoes, Pants,
Trousers, Shirt, Pullover, Vest, Jacket and Wood
Dimension: ca. 400 x 600 x 600 cm
© The Artist, Collection of the Artist
STILL FEELING [PROP],
1993
Lead, Fibreglass and Air
Dimension: 200 x 50 x 33 cm
SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen
© The
Artist
STILL
FEELING [CORNER], 1993
Lead,
Fibreglass, Plaster and Air
Dimension: 197 x 53 x 36 cm
© The Artist, Collection of the Artist
FIELD, 1984–85,
Lead, Fibreglass, Plaster and Air,
Dimension:
195 x 560 x 66 cm,
© The Artist
CLOSE I, 1992,
Lead, Fibreglass, Plaster and Air,
Dimension: 25 x 195,6 x 190 cm,
© The Artist
Photograph by Stephen White
EXERCISE BETWEEN BLOOD AND EARTH, 1979–81,
Chalk on Wall,
Dimension: 1,84 m,
© The Artist
Photograph by Stephen White, London
FEELING MATERIAL I, 2003,
3,25 mm Square Section Rolled Mild Steel Hoops
Various Diameters,
Dimension: 205 x 154 x 128 cm,
© The Artist
BIOGRAFIE
ANTONY GORMLEY
Excerpt From
the Exhibition Catalogue: ANTONY GORMLEY. Learning to Be, Kehrer Verlag, Will
be Published in Autumn 2021
1950
Antony Gormley is born in London as the
youngest of seven children. His parents are devout Catholics.
1951–1960
Grows up in
Hampstead Garden Suburb, London. He repurposes a shed in his parents’ garden as
his personal laboratory and museum. Daily life is rigid and ordered; during the
enforced daily nap time at home, instead of sleeping, he closes his eyes and
imagines an infinite world, waiting to be discovered. This experience will
later become fundamental for his work. Family outings to the British Museum,
where he sees the giant statue of Ramesses II, leave a lasting impression, as
do trips to the excavations of the Fishbourne Roman Palace near his
grandparents’ seaside home in West Wittering, Sussex, where he often spends his
summer holidays. Later, he also spends time in the Black Forest in Germany,
after his German grandparents on his mother’s side return there in the
mid1960s.
1961–1968
Secondary
education at Ampleforth College, a Benedictine school in North Yorkshire, where
he is taught classics and French literature, as well as drawing, painting,
pottery, and woodwork. He is introduced to critical thinking and discovers
modernist sculpture and poetry.
1968–1971
Studies
Archaeology, Anthropology, and Art History at Trinity College, Cambridge. In
the summer of 1969, Gormley takes his first trip to India and journeys further
through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kathmandu. During his second long
vacation in 1970, he visits the historical sites of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and
Egypt, and is particularly taken by the Great Pyramid of Giza, where he spends
over an hour in the King’s Chamber, lying in the sarcophagus. He finishes his
degree at Cambridge after his return.
1971–1974
He travels
once again to the East, via the Levant, visiting Persepolis, Shiraz, and
Isfahan. In northern Iraq, Gormley is briefly detained on suspicion of
espionage and subsequently expelled from the country. In Afghanistan, he visits
the large statues of Buddha in Bamiyan, still intact at the time, and in Sri
Lanka, the ruins of the rock fortress in Sigiriya and the giant Buddha statues
in Gal Vihara, Polonnaruwa. He spends time in the mountain regions of northern
India – in Dalhousie and Darjeeling – where he studies Tibetan Buddhism under
Kalu Rinpoche at the Kargud monastery in Sonada and the vipassana meditation
technique with S. N. Goenka. Gormley regards this as the most important
experience of his life and considers becoming a Buddhist monk. The experience
of learning Chinese brush drawing in Kalimpong strengthens his resolve to
become an artist. He returns to the UK in April 1974 to pursue this goal.
1974–1975
Enrols at the
Central School of Art in London. At the school’s foundry, Gormley learns metal
casting and creates his first experimental works in clay and found materials.
He produces Sleeping Place (1974; now destroyed), a work composed of
plaster-soaked sheets laid over lying bodies. The hollow shells evoke the image
of sleeping people, draped in fabric – an image Gormley had often seen on the
streets and in train stations in India.
1975–1977
Transfers to
Goldsmiths College in London. His teachers include the artists Michael Kenny,
Ivor RobertsJones, Richard Wentworth, Michael Craig-Martin, and Carl Plackman.
Martin Naylor, a visiting tutor, becomes a mentor. During the summer holidays,
Gormley works on a farm in the Brecon Beacons, Wales, where he engages with the
landscape and creates large outdoor sculptures in concrete. In the spring of
1977, he visits an exhibition of the sculptor and architect Walter Pichler at
the Whitechapel Gallery, which inspires a deep engagement with architecture
lasting to this day. After completing his studies, Gormley travels to Ireland
with his brother Michael and visits the country’s megalithic sites.
1977–1978
Studies at
the Slade School of Fine Art in London, while also teaching at the Southend
School of Art. During these years, he creates his first works in stone and
wood. In the spring of 1978, he visits the exhibition Carl Andre: Sculpture
1959–78 at the Whitechapel Gallery. Inspired by Andre’s use of materials,
Gormley begins to explore the possibilities of lead as a sculptural material.
He produces his first sculptures in lead (Full Bowl, 1977/78) as well as his
first bread works (Bread Line, 1979). His lead sculptures seek to veil and
unveil, isolate and reveal found objects.
Looking back,
he later describes his three-part lead sculpture Land, Sea and Air I (1977–79)
as the foundation of his work. It is based on a granite stone found in
Connemara, Ireland, which he covers with lead. This process is repeated three
times, resulting in three near-identical lead cases, one empty (air), one
enclosing the rock (land), and one filled with water (sea). Here, the three
basic elements on which life depends are preserved, removed from perception,
and insulated against atomic radiation. This is Gormley’s first use of lead, an
alchemical material of transformation, here used to transform matter into mind
and give rise to imaginative projection: the basis of his life’s work. Soon
afterwards, Gormley resolves to focus on revealing the inherent subject within
each material, instead of inscribing artistic ideas on the material. For Flat
Tree (1978), he slices the trunk of a larch into over 2,000 thin discs and lays
them out on the floor in a spiralling pattern starting from the top of the tree
in the centre. The annual rings, visible in the cross sections, illustrate the
passage of time and expansive growth. The flat, spiralling arrangement offers a
spatial representation of the expansion of time.
1979
Gormley meets
the artist Vicken Parsons, a painting student at the Slade School of Fine Art,
who will become his life partner and collaborator. They travel to the US on a
scholarship. Gormley spends some time in New York City before they both go on a
road trip together across the country. They visit Walter De Maria’s works of
land art and spend several days in the New Mexico desert to experience the
effects of the space, light, time, and temperature. In Death Valley, Arizona,
Gormley creates a number of sculptural works, such as Rearranged Desert (1979).
This year,
Gormley also creates the first ‘Expansion Works’, exploring the limits and
possibilities of the expansion of form and skin. The mural Exercise Between
Blood and Earth (1979–81) is a visual representation of movement. It features
the silhouette of a running man in the centre, whose outline Gormley repeatedly
draws around it for as long as the reach of his arm allows. The drawing’s
expansion is limited by the length of the artist’s arm, and the image thus
captures the tension between stasis and movement. The endless lines recall a
contour map, the annual rings of a tree, or a fingerprint. Later, Gormley will translate
the drawing’s motif of movement and expansion into the sculpture Still Running
(1990–93).
1980
Back in London, Gormley works as a freelance
artist and takes part in his first international group exhibition, Nuova
Immagine, as part of the sixteenth Milan Triennial. This year, Antony Gormley
marries Vicken Parsons, and during their honeymoon in France, they visit the
alignments of Carnac in Brittany and palaeolithic cave paintings in the
Dordogne and Lot valley.
Gormley
continues to explore the subject of growth, of temporal and spatial expansion.
Footpath (1980/2021) is an example of his early experimental work. Movement is
suggested by two boot soles, one placed slightly in front of the other. The
work alludes to the pose of the kouros sculptures of Ancient Greece, and to the
discourse on sculpture itself – on the art of representing movement through
static objects. The tops of the boots are cut into continuous ribbons that form
two parallel lines trailing the soles.
Room (1980)
is one of the earliest works to offer an understanding of the body as a space.
Gormley cuts his worn clothes – for him a ‘second skin’ – into strips and joins
them together into a continuous ribbon in the order in which they are found on
the body: vest, shirt, jumper, jacket, trousers, underpants, socks. Like a
fence, the ribbon encloses and demarcates a square space, in the middle of
which lie a pair of shoe soles. By expanding his clothes, Gormley creates a new
architectural body-space.
1981
Gormley has
his first solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel and Serpentine galleries in
London. He is also entrusted with his first commissioned work, for the suburb
of Singleton Village, Kent. His End Product (1979), a seed-like figure carved
from the trunk of an elm, is shown at the major survey exhibition British
Sculpture in the Twentieth Century at the Whitechapel Gallery. Jacob Epstein’s
Elemental (1932), shown at the same exhibition, captivates Gormley with its
powerful presence and inspires him to focus more deeply on the body in his
work. He produces large-format brush drawings in oil as well as the first
hollow lead sculptures cast with moulds of his own body. These lead works
extend the intuition that lead can catalyse the transformation of self to
other, inner to outer, and introduce the lead body case as a site of
imaginative inhabitation.
1982
His son Ivo is born in April 1982. Gormley
photographs his lead sculpture Land Sea and Air II (1982), comprising three
body-cases in different poses, on the West Wittering Beach in West Sussex. In
the summer, he takes part in the 40th Venice Biennale, Aperto ’82. The family
moves into a house in Peckham, where Gormley sets up a garden studio to produce
works in plaster and lead. Alongside the body cases, Gormley creates various
objects exploring time and growth as the means through which life transitions
into a different state. In One Apple (1982), Gormley depicts the growth of an
apple – from a bud to a ripe fruit – with fifty-three lead sculptures of
different sizes. Each sculpture contains the dried remains of the respective
phase of growth.
1983
The body
cases are featured in various group exhibitions, such as The Sculpture Show at
the Hayward Gallery in London, New Art at the Tate Gallery in London, and
Transformations: New Sculpture from Britain at the 17th Art Biennial in São
Paulo, Brazil. In an interview with the magazine Aspects (1983/84), Gormley
describes his body as both a tool and material. His sculptures, he explains,
are intended to convey the feeling of being. They are not representations but
an index of where a body once was and where any body could be. The works
intimate a connection between the space outside and the space inside the body.
Each sculpture captures the trace of a lived moment. The artist remains still,
maintaining his body in a particular pose. Then his assistants cover him in a
plaster-soaked scrim. Once this plaster shell has hardened, he is released by
the assistants who cut him out. The artist then joins the individual parts
together and reinforces them with a thin layer of fiberglass. Finally, he beats
lead sheets over the mould, soldering or welding them along horizontally and
vertically oriented seams. Gormley sees these lead works as cases that refer to
the body the way a violin case does a violin. The contours evoke the presence
of the object but do not describe it. Rather these lead body cases invite the
spectator to imaginatively engage with this inner space.
1984–1985
In 1984, Gormley’s works are featured at
various solo and group exhibitions in London, New York, Japan, and Mexico City.
During his trip through Mexico, he encounters Aztec art and the tribal cultures
of the villages in Chiapas, all of which sparks a rich dialogue with the
country lasting to this day. Gormley creates various lead sculptures depicting
a standing male figure with elongated limbs and unusual proportions. In Field
(1984–85), Gormley extends the arms, forming a barrier within the space while
at the same time materialising a sense of perception extending to the horizon.
From the beginning of the 1980s, drawing becomes a daily activity, ‘a
laboratory’ for his work. The first exhibition of his drawings takes place at
the Salvatore Ala Gallery in New York in 1985. Around this time, Gormley also
meets a number of younger gallerists, including Xavier Hufkens, Thaddaeus
Ropac, and Jay Jopling, with whom he enters into long-term partnerships. His
second son, Guy, is born in June 1985.
1986–1987
Gormley
receives several commissions for outdoor sculptures in the UK: A View: A Place
(1986) just outside Stoke-on-Trent; Brick Man (1986) in Leeds; and Sculpture
for Derry Walls (1987) in Derry, Northern Ireland. Five Works is shown at the
Serpentine Gallery in February 1987. His drawings are exhibited at the Seibu
Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, and he takes part in documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany.
The city of Kassel commissions him for the outdoor sculpture Out of the Dark
(1988). His daughter Paloma is born in July 1987. In October that year, the
Great Storm causes heavy damage to his new studio, still under construction, on
Bellenden Road in Peckham. His sublet studio on Acre Lane in Brixton is
completely destroyed, along with his work from the past two years.
1988–1989
Gormley’s
first exhibition in Los Angeles takes place at the Burnett Miller Gallery. In
1989, he prepares a solo exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near
Copenhagen, Denmark. He uses this opportunity to connect with his Danish
ancestry and visits the massive runestones of Jelling in Jutland. Back in London,
Gormley begins to explore new methods and production techniques in order to
engage with the world’s earliest forms of art. This leads to the first version
of Field (1989), comprising 156 handheight clay sculptures produced by Gormley
and his assistants and displayed at the Salvatore Ala Gallery in New York.
Later that year, he creates a second version of Field (1990) with the help of
art students, producing 1,100 sculptures that are installed at the Art Gallery
of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
1990–1991
Gormley and
his family move into a new house near Camden Town, London. He begins to work on
the series Concrete Works, intended as a materialisation of ‘the second body’:
architecture. He uses the lostwax process to cast a void in the form of a human
body inside a concrete block.
In December,
he creates American Field (1991), composed of 35,000 small terracotta figures,
with the support of the British Council and in collaboration with Gabriel
Orozco, as well as the Texca family of brick-makers.
1992–1993
In January
1992, Gormley stays in the Amazon Basin in South America as a guest of the
Goethe-Institut. There, he works with children and adults from the favelas of
Porto Velho to produce another large version of Field for the exhibition Arte
Amazonas at the Museu de Arte in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He also attends the
Earth Summit taking place at the same time, where he listens to speeches by
environmental activists and indigenous people on the expropriation of land and
the loss of local flora and fauna. The experience inspires him to explore the
relationship between art, land, and language.
In the spring
of 1993, he works with local families and students living in Östra Grevie,
Sweden, to produce European Field, which subsequently tours through Central and
Eastern Europe for three years. At the end of 1993, his sculpture Iron:Man
(1993) is permanently installed on Victoria Square in the centre of Birmingham,
UK.
In the early
1990s, he begins the series of expansion works that realise the principles
encoded in the early wall drawing Exercise between Blood and Earth (1979/2021).
He expands body cases with successive layers of plaster until they resemble
fruits and vegetables, before casting them in iron.
Between the
late 1980s and early 1990s, the body cases become increasingly hermetic and
introspective. Gormley pays greater attention to the works’ relationship with
space, purposefully placing them in areas marked by transition. He also
challenges the normative idea that statues must stand upright. Close I (1992),
for example, lies flat on the ground, its limbs sprawling out sideways. Like an
‘X’, the body marks a fixed, static point on the surface of the rotating earth.
Still Feeling [Corner] (1993) lies against the junction of wall and floor. Gormley
sees these works as an attempt to question our habitat while acknowledging
their ‘thingly’ nature. At once ’objective’ and distant, they are nevertheless
potential sites of feeling, particularly in Still Feeling [Prop] (1993),
leaning against the wall like a redundant post awaiting its purpose.
1994–1995
In early 1994, Gormley completes his first
monumental outdoor sculpture, Havmann (Man of the Sea), a 10.1-metre-tall
sculpture made from arctic granite for the coastal town Mo i Rana in northern Norway.
In the autumn, he receives the Turner Prize for his project Field for the
British Isles (1993). In 1995, Critical Mass – an anti-monument evoking the
victims of the twentieth century – is exhibited at the Remise Transport Museum
in Vienna, Austria.
1996–1997
Gormley’s
first retrospective, Still Moving: Works 1975–1996, opens at the Museum of
Modern Art in Kamakura, Japan, in the autumn of 1996 and travels to six venues.
For the work
Allotment II (1996), he systematically measures the dimensions of 300 residents
of Malmö, Sweden, and translates them into five-centimetre-thick
reinforced-concrete bunkers with apertures at the ears, mouth, genitals, and
anus, thus replacing the ‘biological’ body with an ‘architectural’ one. The
works comprise up to twenty-five concrete blocks, divided by avenues and cross
streets. They offer a new perspective on the relationship between male and
female, female and female, male and male, and adult and child. The viewer is
invited to enter an open maze, against which he or she can sense his or her own
body and scale.
In 1997,
Gormley is appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his
services to public art.
Gormley
installs Another Place (1997) on the Wattenmeer in Cuxhaven, Germany, once an
important port city for emigrants sailing to America. This marks a transition
in his work from void body cases to bodies made as a solid mass. Another Place
comprises 100 solid iron casts of the artist’s own body, which are placed over
an area of three square kilometres along the beach, looking out to the sea.
Having
concentrated on insulation and expansion of the skin, Gormley now begins to
work on the Insiders series. He creates these cast iron sculptures based on
moulds of his own body. But he reduces the body’s volume by two-thirds, seeking
to reveal the attitude of the body by isolating its core.
1998–1999
In February
1988, the Angel of the North is installed in the north of England on the site
of the St. Anne Colliery in Gateshead, overlooking the main roads to Newcastle.
In the Domain
series, Gormley attempts to materialise reality as described by advanced
physics, marking another shift from void to solid. Here, the index of the body
is translated into a matrix of interdependent stainless-steel trajectories,
lightly connected but open to space. He uses only the minimum amount of
material required to suggest the body’s presence and maintain its integrity.
In March 1999, Gormley meets the British
quantum physicist Basil Hiley, a collaborator of David Bohm’s. Bohm’s concept
of the ‘holomovement’ – that all phenomena are events rather than things –
inspires Gormley to embark on the Quantum Cloud series, where an open matrix
seems to condense into a Domain or vice versa. The work evokes Einstein’s
general theory of relativity in which mass and energy are mutual
materialisations. That year, Gormley is awarded the South Bank Prize for Visual
Art.
2000–2001
The
thirty-metre-tall Quantum Cloud, commissioned by the British government as part
of the Millennium Project, is unveiled at the Greenwich Peninsula in January
2000. For the first time, Gormley integrates digital 3-D design processes into
his methods. He creates Quantum Cloud’s matrix, composed of galvanised steel
elements, using finite element analysis software.
Gormley creates his first Blockworks,
approximating the body’s form using small pixel-like blocks, which marks a
transition from manual casting techniques to digital construction methods.
Steht und
Fällt, commissioned for the new German Bundestag in Berlin, is permanently
installed in the interior courtyard of the Jakob-Kaiser-Haus in 2001.
2002–2003
Gormley
commissions the architect David Chipperfield to design a new studio in King’s
Cross, London. He completes the installation Inside Australia around Lake
Ballard, a large salt lake in Australia, in 2003. The series comprises
fifty-one Insiders, derived from scans of Wongatha and white settlers. The
British anthropologist Hugh Brody films the project and writes about its anthropological
context.
In January
2003, Gormley completes Asian Field in collaboration with 350 residents of all
ages from a village in the Guangdong province of China. This is the largest
version of Field to date, comprising over 210,000 clay figures.
This year, Gormley also begins to work on the Feeling Material series, in which he returns to the theme of the interaction of body, mass, and energy. He uses a spiralling line that orbits close and at arm’s length around the body, creating an energy field with a single line without a beginning or end. Gormley becomes a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2003.
2004–2005
Gormley develops the room installation Clearing I (2004) for White Cube, London. It is a three-dimensional drawing, made from a continuous, five-kilometre-long, square aluminium tube filling the entire room. The work is composed of a single line that, like in Feeling Material, has no beginning or end. He creates Making Space Taking Place (2004) in Poggibonsi, Italy. The site-specific work launches a partnership with the Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, lasting to the present day.
In March 2005, Gormley joins Cape Farwell’s third research expedition to the Arctic in order to experience first-hand the urgency of climate change.
His interest
in dance leads to a collaboration with the dancers Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi
Cherkaoui and the composer Nitin Sawhney for the performance Zero Degrees at
the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London. The 100 iron body forms of Another Place
are permanently installed on Crosby Beach to the north of Liverpool.
2006–2007
Gormley
continues and extends his interest in the second body of architecture by
creating Breathing Room (2006–2012), conceived as a drawing in space that
spectators can enter. It is composed of luminous, nesting, three-dimensional
frames stretching out along different axes, with the frames each enclosing an
identical volume of space. Rising from a horizontal, mandala-like plan on the
floor, the work uses perspective to destroy perspective. It allows the visitors
to become figures against a background space outlined by a work of sculpture.
The square aluminium tubing is coated in photoluminescent paint. In the same
year, Gormley works closely with architects and scientists to realise Blind
Light (2007), a large glass room containing a dense and light-filled cloud box
in which the visitors seem to disappear, even to themselves.
In 2007, Gormley has an exhibition in the Bundestag Gallery and is awarded the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture.
2008–2009
Gormley’s
studio expands, and the artist is teeming with new ideas for projects. He works
closely with engineers to produce Firmament (2008), comprising room-sized
constellations of steel elements and steel balls welded together. Around this
time, Gormley meets the British mathematician and theoretical physicist Roger
Penrose and is inspired by his ideas about ‘emergence’ and chaos theory. He
donates Feeling Material XXXIV (2008) to CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, in
recognition of the influence particle physics has had on his work.
In June 2009,
Gormley presents five episodes of The Essay on BBC Radio 3, introducing his
heroes Jacob Epstein, Constantin Brâncuși, Alberto Giacometti, Joseph Beuys,
and Richard Serra.
Gormley
continues to explore the phenomenon of expansion in space with a wide range of
materials. Central to this work is the basic idea of the body as space. As part
of the Exposed Expansion Works series, he applies the principles governing the
universe’s inflation following the big bang to a body space that lies at the
centre of Flare II (2008). The sculpture is like a contained explosion whose
outer skin is an expansion of the inner boundary.
2010–2011
Gormley
continues to work intensively during these years, creating numerous pieces for
exhibitions and public commissions. In the summer of 2010, Horizon Field (2010)
is installed in Vorarlberg, Austria, for a period of two years. The Museum of
Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO) holds a major retrospective of his drawings in
October 2010. That year, Gormley opens a second studio in Hexham,
Northumberland, and buys a country house in Norfolk, where he sets up studios
and living areas for artists.
For his solo
exhibition at the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, in 2011, he removes the museum’s
classical statues from their plinths and raises the floor so that the classical
marbles and the museum visitors share the same ground. He creates a productive
tension with a group of his own Hermitage Blockworks (2010– 11), exhibited in
the adjacent space.
2012–2013
In April
2012, Gormley presents his installation Horizon Field Hamburg at the
Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. The work is a vast, black, mirror-finish platform,
measuring 20 x 50 metres and hovering 7.5 metres from the ground. Up to 100
visitors are invited to stand, walk, dance, or lie down on it. The structure,
weighing fifty tonnes, is suspended by eight cables, which allow every visitor
to move the whole situation. He also completes Model (2012), a lying,
rectilinear body case in Corten steel, conceived both as a sculpture and
building, for White Cube in London.
Gormley wins
the Obayashi Prize in 2012. The following year, he receives the Praemium
Imperiale, awarded by the Japan Art Association.
Gormley once
again returns to his idea about the expansion of the body-space seen in the
iron works of the early 1990s. The newer Cast Expansion Works are large, cubic,
cast-iron forms that map the laws of the Hubble constant – the universe’s rate
of expansion – to the body-space and represent the body as a collection of
cells. All cells are in a state of expansion, encroaching on one another, while
the collection as a whole progresses towards its final state in the form of a
cube. Gormley chooses expressive poses that give rise to a tension between
their origin as a body and their transformation into a rectilinear mass. In
Loss III (2012), he reinterprets the body as an assemblage of cubic blocks. The
work was created based on a set of mathematical-physical principles, its pose
suggests self-observation and self-reflection, eliciting an emotional,
empathetic response from the viewer.
2014–2015
Gormley is
knighted in 2014. He acquires a 3-D scanner, developed with Roberto Cipolla,
Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge, for his
studio in King’s Cross. This proves to be a pivotal moment for the further
development of his work. He installs Expansion Field at the Zentrum Paul Klee
in Bern, Switzerland. In the autumn, the film Antony Gormley: Being Human is
broadcast as part of BBC One’s Imagine series.
During this
period, the artist continues his exploration of contained and expanded space.
One example is the monumental piece Murmur (2014) – a drawing in space that is
derived from the mass of Bare IV (2014). Form IV (2014) is inspired by
Michelangelo’s marble sculpture Crouching Boy (c. 1525), depicting a boy
squatting down, his hands around one of his feet, lost in deep thought. Gormley
captures this moment of introspection, translating it into a cast-iron
composition made from cubes of different sizes. This work is then expanded into
a large, hermetic, cubic tank to form Hold (2016).
2016–2017
Gormley takes
over a foundry on the brink of closure in the northeast of England. The
facility, which had previously cast Gormley’s works, can thus continue to
support his technically innovative projects. His solo exhibition at White Cube,
London, in October 2016 features important new works, including Run (2016) and
Sleeping Field (2015–16).
2018–2019
Many solo
exhibitions take place during these years, for example in Philadelphia, US, and
Delos, Greece, as well as at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the Royal
Academy of Arts in London.
Gormley travels
across the world for BBC Two’s documentary film How Art Began. He visits caves
in Europe, Indonesia, and Australia, where he spends several days studying the
Gwion rock paintings in the Kimberley Region. For Gormley, the cave paintings
are a testament to the fact that ‘art was essential, universal, a part of human
life and survival from the start’.
Gormley
continues to explore the boundaries of the human body as part of his Expansion
Works series. In Cumulate (Breathe II) (2018), he returns to the language of
the iron expansion works and that of the lead body cases, expanding the skin of
a body in a similar way to Flare II (2008), but now enclosing it in a sealed
lead skin. The body is again turned into a self-contained explosion, or an
expanding universe.
2020–2021
These years
are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has an impact on international
exhibitions and travel. During this year of uncertainty, Gormley focuses deeply
on developing works at his studio and also participates in a number of podcasts
as well as radio and television programmes on creativity. In the spring of
2020, New York Clearing is installed outdoors in Brooklyn Bridge Park in New
York. The work comprises a single line of square aluminium tubing, eighteen
kilometres in length, that loops and twists without a beginning or end.
Habit, a solo
exhibition of new sculptures and drawings, takes place at Galerie Thaddaeus
Ropac Marais in Paris in the spring of 2020, just before the city goes into
lockdown.
In January 2021, Gormley takes part in The
Great Big Art Exhibition project, in which people across the UK are invited to
create artworks for their windows and gardens as part of the nation’s biggest
exhibition. His major solo exhibition Learning to Be, postponed from 2020 due to
the pandemic, opens at SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen in the summer of 2021, and
Horizon Field Singapore is unveiled as part of the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden
Commission at the National Gallery Singapore in August.
