ANTONY GORMLEY: LEARNING TO BE AT SCHAUWERK SINDELFINGEN

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

DIRECTOR BARBARA BERGMANN

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 

EXERCISE BETWEEN BLOOD AND EARTH, 1979–1981 ( DETAIL )

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.