Antony Gormley SKEW II, 2020

Antony Gormley conceives of art as a place of becoming, in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. By engaging critically with both his own body and those of others, he confronts fundamental questions about where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. SKEW II is part of the artist’s exploration of the body as a volume and a purely structural entity. Stripped of its identity, and built with iron beams like a high-rise tower, the human figure is nonetheless still recognisable as such, and retains all its emotive power, lending a feeling of vulnerability and impermanence to the metal structure. Somewhere between presence and absence, the body and its surroundings interpenetrate each other, prompting a powerful reflection on the body as space and what the artist describes as the ‘mortal struggle between the immanent and the manifest.’