Antony Gormley’s ‘Inextricable’ opens in Seoul Inside the artist’s radical vision of sculpture and the city
To Antony Gormley, sculpture is a provocation. Unlike the functional objects that populate our daily lives, a sculpture is an interloper: something that refuses utility, disrupts habit and demands to be noticed. Encountering one in the street, he suggests, is like finding a dropped wallet—an intimate fragment of another’s life exposed, displaced and suddenly vulnerable. But unlike the wallet, the sculpture does not invite ownership or resolution. Instead, it confronts us, challenging our instincts to see, touch and imagine.
That idea of confrontation—sculpture as a reflexive instrument that prompts him to ask “What am I, and what is a world?”—lies at the heart of Inextricable, Gormley’s first solo exhibition in Seoul. Staged across two galleries, White Cube and Thaddaeus Ropac, and opening alongside Frieze Seoul, the exhibition explores the tension between body and architecture, intimacy and exposure, home and city. It is as much a meditation on Seoul’s restless urban landscape as it is on the human condition itself.
At Thaddaeus Ropac in Hannam, the exhibition unfolds like a dialogue with the private sphere. Works such as the looping Extended Strapworks (2022–2025) trace sinuous lines across floors and walls, destabilising any fixed boundary between interior and exterior. Two Open Blockworks, Open Daze (2024) and Home (2025), articulate modular forms that invite the viewer in, while pressed Knotworks (2019-2022) recall hidden infrastructures—plumbing, circuitry and the skeleton of domestic life. Together, they remind us that our dwellings do not simply contain us; they shape the very way we inhabit the world.
