Antony Gormley Umwelt

This exhibition brings together my most recent attempts to reconcile the first and the second body; if the first body, our material, biological body, is our first dwelling, then the second is our built environment, which we have become part of and largely dependent upon. These works attempt to map and materialise the interactions between these two bodies. — Antony Gormley

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Conceived for Villa Kast and responding to the context of this former family home, the exhibition Umwelt comprises sculptures from Antony Gormley’s recent investigations into living space, where the body is seen as a place rather than an object. As the title indicates, the works on view explore in drawing and sculpture the dynamics between the internal condition of the human body and its environment (‘Umwelt’), testing its boundaries and permeability.

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This exhibition presents, for the first time, a group of ‘Extended Strapworks’ that Gormley has developed over the last two and a half years. Linear and open, these sculptures comprise two or four circuits of rusted ribbon steel in the form of Möbius strips that pass around the space surrounding a single body. Sculptures, such as Dwell (2022) and Implicate III (2022), break the body-boundary and reach out towards the edges of the spaces they inhabit, recognising how a room’s orthogonality affects our internal perception of space. Seen through the villa’s many doorways and apertures, the sculptures seem to extend out infinitely, stretching beyond the confines of the rooms. For the artist, the lack of a definable body-boundary poses the question of ‘where the body begins and ends and to what extent we, having made the world, are then made by it.’

Implicate III, 2022
6 mm Corten steel
188.3 x 261.7 x 272.8 cm (74.13 x 103.03 x 107.4 in)

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In the exhibition, Gormley also presents works from his earlier series, including the ‘Blockworks’ and ‘Open Blockworks’, to illuminate the origin of his ‘Extended Strapworks’.

 

In questioning the fundamental spaces of human habitation, both bodily and environmental, the artist addresses conditions of vulnerability and our instinctive desire for protection: ‘I use sculpture to re-examine, for myself, what it means to inhabit this bit of matter that is the body, hoping that this might be of use to others. I want to use the instrumental potential of sculpture, through which you might sense an extended field of perception.’

 

Still II, 2021
Cast iron
183.8 x 36.1 x 36.4 cm (72.36 x 14.21 x 14.33 in)

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Outside, behind the villa and facing the Mirabell Gardens, is Run (2016). This large-scale work materialises the volume of a small room in a single, endless cast line. Mapping the space of a human habitat, Run delineates but also confuses the surfaces and apertures of our built world by making them porous. If the works inside the villa test the bounding condition of the ‘first body’, as well as the confines of the ‘second body’, then Run challenges the viewer to consider how architecture both encourages and enforces certain forms of bodily choreography.

Run, 2016
Cast iron
277.5 x 318.6 x 421.8 cm (109.25 x 125.43 x 166.06 in)

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Antony Gormley’s ‘Strapworks’ (2018–19) highlight the artist’s preoccupation with structural and conceptual queries, specifically the shifting interrelation of inner and outer surfaces, as found in the Möbius strip or the Klein bottle. The dynamic between still object and moving viewer is activated with a line that appears to continually change as one’s perspective shifts.

The ‘Strapworks’ have evolved out of the ‘Open Blockworks’ series and the evolution from these works that still articulate body space in the form of rectangular cells is apparent in early works from this series.

Fold, 2020
8 mm stainless steel
170.5 x 58 x 42 cm (67.13 x 22.83 x 16.54 in)

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‘I wanted to open the body up,’ explains the artist about the creation of his series of ‘Open Blockworks’, which he began in 2014. ‘I had been using absolute masses that are solid and confront you with your own bodily spatial displacement, but another way is to make intersecting cells out of planes that are enclosures but are open enough to invite a speleology of the eye.’

Open Gauge II, 2021
8 mm Corten steel
197.9 x 51.9 x 31.8 cm (77.91 x 20.43 x 12.52 in)

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Carefully positioned throughout Umwelt are a number of Gormley’s drawings. In his essay for the exhibition catalogue, art historian Rye Dag Holmboe writes: ‘The drawings were moving and felt quite personal both because of their scale – [...] they look like worlds in miniature – and because they are “exercises in dowsing for feeling”, as Antony said. The page can be a site of experimentation in a way that steel cannot, and drawing has always helped him figure things out.’ 

Plasma Pleroma, 2014
Carbon and casein on paper
28 x 38 cm (11.02 x 14.96 in)

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Junction X, 2022
Walnut ink on paper
19 x 14 cm (7.48 x 5.51 in)

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Junction X, 2022 Walnut ink on paper 19 x 14 cm (7.48 x 5.51 in)

Entangle I, 2022
Walnut ink on paper
38 x 28 cm (14.96 x 11.02 in)

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Entangle I, 2022 Walnut ink on paper 38 x 28 cm (14.96 x 11.02 in)

While the sculptures on the ground floor of the villa focus on individual bodies in space, the exhibition continues upstairs with two ‘double’ works that explore human connections within shared environments, which show one body osmosing into another. The artist explains that Circuit (2022) and Tangle (2022) are ‘a realisation of lockdown; when you’re not always in a rush, suddenly you become aware that the people you live with are also part of your dwelling. These works are about closeness and what it means to share. How, in other words, we are social beings defined by our intimate relations.’ Here is the promise of bodies in space that is carried on into bodies as space.

Tangle, 2022
8 mm Corten steel
187.3 x 56.2 x 53.3 cm (73.74 x 22.13 x 20.98 in)

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The most recent drawings in the exhibition are made with deliquescent inkcap mushrooms and show bodies caught as if in a web. The artist explains: ‘It was only last year that I discovered that you could use the ink from inkcap mushrooms. I picked some last autumn and I had never used them before, but they are really remarkable in terms of this very dense, almost pure carbon black. It has a wonderful viscosity like the albumin of an egg. I guess at the back of all of this was this growing understanding of the mycelium mycorrhizal background of all growing things and the role of fungi. They are the least understood of the fundamental kingdoms in terms of evolution and how utterly fundamental they are to the biosphere – and indeed to all life on this planet.’ 

 

Hold I, 2022
Inkcap on paper
38.7 x 28 cm (15.24 x 11.02 in)

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