DERNEBURG.- The Hall Art Foundation announces an exhibition by acclaimed British artist Antony Gormley being held at its Schloss Derneburg location. Gormley is internationally lauded for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. This is the largest Gormley exhibition held in Germany to date, bringing together works on paper, large-scale installations, and indoor and monumental outdoor sculpture that span the artist’s sculptural journey, from the early 1980s to site-specific works created this year.
The core of Gormley’s sculptural thinking – the relationship between mass and space, carried through skin, grid and volume – can be seen on the ground floor. The first work, from the series Learning to See III (1993), is a sculpture of embodied consciousness: an alert, aware, erect body. It has one closed, continuous surface. Its eyes, for the first time, are indicated, acknowledging a kind of internal vision. Set II (2017), in the adjacent room, uses the same body posture, but here the grid structure common to architecture is used to map the subjective space of the body. This pairing is qualified by a final work, Fit (2016), an unequivocal translation of anatomy into architecture that represents the high-energy zone of a body’s presence.
Being continues to investigate ways of presenting the body less as an object and more a place – a site of transformation and an axis of physical and spatial experience. A number of early lead “Bodycase” works are made on molds taken directly from the artist’s body. These works are a materialization of a real event on a real body in real time. Using verticality and laterality, they attempt to confront the viewer with their own embodiment in space and time. One work, Close I (1992), is a splayed and prostate body on the floor – an “X” that marks a fixed point on the surface of the earth. This work represents our dependency on the planet and acknowledges that each body is a point of reconciliation between centrifuge and gravity.
One of eight large-scale Corten Steel Expansion Field sculptures, Expansion Field 40/60 (2014), continues the idea of a case for a body, although these particular cases are made with the orthogonal geometry of a room. These “Tankers”, as the artist describes them, invoke the expanding nature of consciousness, in spite of bodily determinism.
In Expansion Field I am applying the Hubble Constant – the idea that space is a state of continual expansion – to the subjective space of the body in different attitudes of emotional contraction or extension. These eight works attempt a bridge between the darkness of the body and deep space.
The linear display of the Expansion Field sculptures is complemented by a series of recent body prints and woodblocks. These works on paper prompt a conversation between the Paleolithic gesture of presence and Modernism's attraction to the void. Woodblock prints of planes equivalent to those found in the Expansion Field sculptures make x-ray-like images of the space of the body, where the grain of the wood forms a subtle, translucent crosshatching. These woodblock prints are paired with body prints, like Feel III (2016), made with a mixture of crude oil and petroleum jelly, which indicate instant indices of lived time.
Sleeping Field (2015-2016) is a large-scale installation in which architectural language is used to describe a city made up of 700 miniature body-forms. Each body-form is made from 29 discrete parts, re-configured to make up 70 original poses, each cast 10 times. The work refers to humankind’s dependency on the city as an instrument for survival. While it can be seen as an urban landscape, it also refers to the present crisis of migration and the camps that have become familiar in Turkey, Greece and Germany. Distillate I (2003), one of Gormley’s earliest built “Blockworks”, proposes an alternative model of a landscape or citadel made of multiple cells. Here, blocks of six discrete sizes map the space of an unconscious body.
