Antony Gormley Still Moving
Long Museum West Bund
Lane 3398, Longteng Avenue
Xuhui District, Shanghai
Still Moving will be the first major presentation of Antony Gormley’s work in China. The artist offers an exhibition which interacts with the unique architecture of the Long Museum to create a test site for both the work and the viewer, while introducing the major themes that have concerned him over the last 40 years: body as space and space as object.
At its core is Critical Mass II (1995) an installation of 60 life-size cast iron body forms. This seminal work has been widely exhibited in Europe, but this will be its first showing in Asia. Some of the body forms are installed in a linear progression, in positions from foetal to stargazing recalling the ‘ascent of man’.Some are suspended in arrested fall, others lie scattered across the space or form a jumbled pile.This multiple work celebrates the sculptural body as object and ground for feeling and engages our deepest hopes and fears; our attraction to light as well as to darkness.
A new work, Passage II(2017),is a 15.5 metre-long tunnel, whose shape is modelled on a standing human form. It too is both object and experience, suggesting a correlative for the interior of the body and offering a journey into darkness and the unknown.
