Antony Gormley is one of Britain’s leading contemporary sculptors focusing on the human body as site. The exhibition at KUB brings together four major work series from Gormley’s oeuvre: the Expansion works, Allotment, Critical Mass, and Clearing. Embedded in the context of Peter Zumthor’s architecture, the works challenge the fine line in the human psyche that marks the mental balance between asserting oneself as an individual and being contextualized by architectural space. Over the last 25 years Antony Gormley has revitalized the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation, using his own body as subject, tool and material. Since 1990 he has expanded his concern with the human condition to explore the collective body and the relationship between self and other in large-scale installations like Allotment and Critical Mass, both of which will be presented at KUB this summer. Gormley’s recent work increasingly engages with energy systems, fields and vectors, rather than mass and defined volume. This is evident in the dynamic work Clearing, which pushes against the gallery walls, ceiling and floor, and will fill the second floor of KUB. Gormley’s work has been exhibited extensively, with solo shows throughout the UK in venues such as the Whitechapel, Tate and Hayward galleries, and internationally at museums including the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Germany. Blind Light, a major solo exhibition of his work, was held at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 2007. He has participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta 8 in Kassel. Angel of the North and, more recently, Quantum Cloud on the Thames in Greenwich, London, are amongst the most celebrated examples of contemporary British sculpture. Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999 and the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture 2007. Gormley´s Expansion works began with an obsession with renegotiating the skin: questioning where things and events begin and end. All forms become egg-shaped if their skin is repeated, achieving an equilibrium between stasis and potential. The Expansion works apply this process to the body in dynamic motion, moving bodies either in self-locomotion or in positions where the body is the subject of movement. Body and Fruit are derived from a body-mold in a clasped diving position. To quote Gormley: “I discovered that it was possible to extend the form through the application of a consistent measure by using wooden spars radiating from nodal points at the extremities of the body. They were linked together at their outer ends to form a continuous surface where the feet, hands, buttocks and head become the foci of a number of domed forms that coalesce.”
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If any of you are out and about in Bregenz, Germany (very random), I urge you to go and see it. I think of this artist as a modern Giacometti, existential in his questionning of human fate and temporal condition. The same depth of human insight in present in both artist' works yet Gormley's oeuvre is infused with an optimism impossible to find in Giacometti's troubled figures. Giacometti found the solution was to reduce his figures to paper thin, frail sculptures that ceased to interact with the outside world. Gormley, faced with the same challenge, makes them bigger, restoring humanity to its role as guardian of nature, stronger than ever to face the world.
