Gormley's explorations of body, space and time continue to test environment, form and feeling, often pitting one against the other. This exhibition intends to "interrogate the body through architecture, asserting it as both a model of spatial organisation and subject to gravitational force" thus "articulating the tensions as well as convergences between the human animal and his or her habitat."
In a sequence of twelve new solid iron blockworks, Gormley puts the formal purity of Modernist abstraction to work to evoke and provoke inner states. These works use the language of stacking, propping and cantilevering, and mass, familiar from the work of Richard Serra to objectify the experience of embodiment; to produce a somatic sense of containment or conditioning that exists within urban man.
The exhibition contains some foundational works. Base is a two metre square solid concrete slab that encloses a void impression of an absent body, identifiable through the holes created by the soles of the feet, palms of the hand and the brain cavity. Also on view are two versions of Edge, installed perpendicular to the wall, providing a haptic destabilisation of the architecture.
In a sequence of twelve new solid iron blockworks, Gormley puts the formal purity of Modernist abstraction to work to evoke and provoke inner states
In the gallery's garden Gormley will install a double sculptural work in marble. The work tests the evolution of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, transforming bone, skin and muscle into a finished work of crystalline geometric rigour not dissimilar to the structure of marble itself. As in 2 x 2, shown at the 2010 Carrara Biennale, Gormley creates the image of a body that is inspired by the great artistic tradition of the nude, but at the same time reflects our new knowledge about the sub-optical properties of matter.
This installation and exhibition see the artist trying to reconcile the subjective space of the individual with the idea of the expanding universe, questioning how the human project fits into the scheme of things.
Antony Gormley: Vessel
Galleria Continua
Via del Castello 11, San Gimignano