Antony Gormley PERCEIVE II, 2021

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.

PERCEIVE II (2021) belongs to Antony Gormley’s Branchers series, which treats the entire body-zone as an open space to branch into. As the artist states: ‘I love what a root is as a metaphor but also what it is as a system. Let’s think of the space of the body as an unknown: we are going to start a three-dimensional exploration, a tendril-like rooting system that feels its way into this bodily darkness and touches the bounding condition, maybe sometimes even breaking through it. That sense of exposing the unknowable to the light is important to me.’