Antony Gormley FACE II, 2021

Making sculpture stems from a need to leave a trace of existence, but there is an even greater need to challenge existence itself with mute objects that look back at us and question our materiality with their own.
– Antony Gormley

FACE II (2021) is part of Antony Gormley’s renowned BLOCKWORKS series in which he investigates the role of architecture in conditioning the human body. In this series the artist develops a specific language composed of rectangular blocks that are stacked, propped and cantilevered to indicate our bodies’ urban-bound condition. As Gormley states: ‘The series started with the idea of building using physical pixels, but the small blocks turned into ever bigger blocks and description gave way to the realisation that the way one block sat on top of another could carry the feeling of inhabiting a body. At this larger scale, what the blocks do to each other is the critical thing.’