Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková Exhibition Review
In lead, plaster cast, crude oil, clay, steel, inks, or bread, Antony Gormley is a sculptor. In this new collaborative exhibition with poet and architect Pavla Melková, Gormley’s faintly anthropological fascination with the human form and forms of humanity is entangled with Melková’s words and sustained across seven rooms in the Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague.
After passing through Rudolfinum’s grand neo-Renaissance interior–with its decorative cornices of dancing fawns and silk-draped nudes–on entering the first room of Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková, there is an immediate shedding of cultural weight and a feeling of a return to something that is straightforwardly grounded at a cruder, more base human level. Arranged sparsely on the walls are sets of Gormley’s sketches and ink paintings. They have a rawness in their inconsistent page sizes, formats, and torn edges. Pinned under glass, it's as if the loose leaves were specimens gathered from an abundant mass of similar works stacked in Gormley’s studio draws. Each one looks to be a modest strategy for working something out; some appear concerned with modelling scale and form, others look more like rituals to liberate uncertain ideas. Around Gormley’s works, running down the walls and pushing across the corners of the room, are graceful lines clipped from Melková’s poetry in their original Czech and in English translation.
In the second room, titled “Encircling”, is Gormley’s site-specific installation Orbit Field (2024). The installation insists on visitors being alert as they move under and around metres high interlocking aluminium rings that run the length of the room. They look like trails from lines of flight that should be traced in the air with a finger. Orbit Field gives architectural depth to the previous room’s flat drawings whose only relief is the scarred and welted paper they are drawn on. Despite the shift in scale and contrasting precision of hard aluminium to bleeding inks, Orbit Field doesn't leave behind the oblique wonder from the first room. Rather, it delivers the visitor into a different register of a similar experience in which they are part of the sculpture's becoming rather than a mere observer of artefact. Orbit Field is what it welcomes to be done, as such, more a situation than a thing.
There are more excerpts of poems and sketches in the room that follows. Like the first and the fifth rooms, it is titled “Permeating”. The few lines of text are like marginalia worked around each set of Gormley’s drawings. Melková’s words do not describe Gormley’s works, though, neither do Gormley’s works illustrate Melková’s poems. They do, however, share common themes of interest, there is a resonant energy that draws them towards each other but they ultimately remain separate, independent, unique. This is most pronounced, and most literal, in the exhibition title. The slash between their names describes a connection by difference, it brings two distinct things close but ultimately holds them apart. Similarly, when their works appear to be at their closest, which is to say, when the gap between them seems so narrow that they could share the same vision, the same intent, this is when their essential differences are most apparent. Seeing Gormely’s gestural marks, for instance, and reading next to them of the “living tissue of memory” or of “lightness to weight”, there is a fundamental resistance, a repulsion, amplified by their closeness that can be felt at these moments. This is the contrast between the allure of Gormley's drawings in their hazy ineffability, and the appeal of Melková’s poems in their crisp articulation.
Melvoká is literally bringing language to Gormley’s work. Unlike the Buddhistic, spiritualist language that Gormley might return to in interview, Melvoká’s form is an earthen, self-possessed poetry. It works because it does not have to be faithful to Gormley’s work, instead, it plucks at it and by association appears to weave into its blatant intertextuality. As such, the relationship between the poetry and the sketches–and the rest of the exhibition more generally–seems frankly, and non-pejoratively, incidental. It’s akin to the way patterns can be derived from nature in land art, or how music can be heard from a motionless orchestra. This kind of open-ended relationship between work and world is not new to Gormley. Rarely feeling like surplus, what is incidental often gains a welcome sense of place in his works.
