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
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
