November 13, 2023

ANTONY GORMLEY: CRITICAL MASS AT MUSÉE RODIN

 


ANTONY GORMLEY: CRITICAL MASS AT MUSÉE RODIN 



ANTONY GORMLEY: CRITICAL MASS AT MUSÉE RODIN 

October 17, 2023 - March 3, 2024

This autumn, the Musée Rodin welcomes British artist Antony Gormley. For over forty years, Gormley has explored the relationship of the human body to space through a critical engagement with his own body and, more recently, through examining the relationship of the body to the built environment. Titled Critical Mass, this exhibition at the musée Rodin will activate all areas of the museum, including the temporary exhibition space, gardens, Marble Galerie and Hotel Biron. Key works from across Gormley’s career will enter into dialogue with Rodin’s own sculptures, inviting visitors to reflect on the two sculptors and their shared investment in asking what the body offers sculpture as a subject, object and reflexive tool.

At the centre of this exhibition is Critical Mass II (1995), an installation comprising sixty life-sized sculptures that punctuate the museum’s temporary exhibition space and garden. In this major work, the artist isolates twelve fundamental positions unique to the human body, casts each five times and then places them in different configurations, sometimes to contradictory and absurd effect. Crawling, squatting, kneeling and standing, the installation will unfold in the garden with a line of the twelve positions that ends at Rodin’s The Gates of Hell. Inside, a dense cluster of cast iron bodies piled in a heap will look as if they have been toppled onto the ground. Other bodies will be pressed against walls and hang suspended from the ceiling. For Gormley, ‘the work references the materiality of sculpture and our dependency on the materiality of the body, both being subject to position, context and jeopardy’.

In addition to Critical Mass II, six of Gormley’s ‘Insider’ works will populate the Marble Galerie and four carefully chosen sculptures will be placed alongside Rodin’s masterpieces in the permanent exhibition rooms of Hotel Biron. The interaction between Gormley’s and Rodin’s work will question and disturb our existing assumptions about sculpture and its relation to the body.

The exhibition will also offer a fascinating insight into Gormley’s working methods and collaborative approach to making sculpture, a thread which can be traced back to Rodin’s own studio and its mode of collective production. A series of working models will be placed alongside Rodin’s own maquettes, while a life-size plaster mould can be seen by Study for Balzac’s Dressing Gown to acknowledge how both artists have used moulds and plaster as sources of new possibility. Over two hundred of Gormley’s workbooks will also be on view, revealing forty years’ worth of ideas, reflections and drawings.

On the exhibition, Gormley has said: ‘The reason that Rodin remains a key source of inspiration and renewal for sculpture is the way that he liberated it by combining ancient and modern methods and materials in an extraordinarily prescient way. Through open experimentation, the originator of modern sculpture took full advantage of the freedom to experiment, armed with all the means of an emergent industrial age and its ability to mechanically produce in profusion. I consider Critical Mass II to be the most concentrated example of my attempt to reanimate and re-purpose the power of the body in the art of sculpture.’

You may click to below links to reach all the Antony Gormley’s news from My Magical Attic Blog.

https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2021/08/antony-gormley-learning-to-be-at.html

https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2022/08/antony-gormley-ground-at-voorlinden.html

https://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2022/11/antony-gormley-body-field-at-xavier.html

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

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

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

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








































































ANTONY GORMLEY ATELIER PHOTOGRAPHS




























ANTONY GORMLEY ATELIER PHOTOGRAPHS





























































































ANTONY GORMLEY

Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.

Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at the Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg (2022); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (2022); National Gallery Singapore, Singapore (2021); Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Sindelfingen (2021); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); Delos, Greece (2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2019); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2019); Long Museum, Shanghai (2017); National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Forte di Belvedere, Florence (2015); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2014); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Rio de 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). Permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Inside Australia (Lake Ballard, Western Australia), Exposure (Lelystad, the Netherlands), Chord (MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA) and Alert (Imperial College London, England).

Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007, the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2013. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year’s Honours list in 2014. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003.

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950.

https://www.antonygormley.com/resources/profile