Awakening Sculpture An Interview with Antony Gormley

By Jong-hyeok Jeon, edited by Anna Son

Although Antony Gormley’s exhibitions in Korea have opened, their resonance continues to unfold through his ongoing retrospective SURVEY at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. Across Seoul’s Thaddaeus Ropac, White Cube, and Wonju's Museum SAN, Gormley explored the human body as both vessel and environment—an origin point for perceiving how form, space, and consciousness intertwine.

In the interview, Gormley reflects on the central question guiding forty-five years of practice: What is sculpture good for? Revisiting early works such as Footpath and Blanket Drawing V, he considers sculpture not as representation but as direct embodiment—matter animated by lived experience. His installations in Dallas extend this inquiry to the urban condition, where bodies and architectures co-construct one another.

Discussing his projects in Korea, Gormley emphasizes the body as “our first habitation” and the city as “our second body.” Inextricable, presented across Thaddaeus Ropac and White Cube in Seoul, dissolves the divide between interior and exterior space, prompting visitors to sense how built environments shape human perception. At Museum SAN, Drawing on Space transforms the gallery into a field of orbital steel rings that invite physical navigation, turning the viewer into part of the sculptural field.

For Gormley, sculpture remains a radical art form precisely because it resists the virtual. By grounding thought in material encounter, his works remind us that “seeing, touching, and imagining” are inseparable acts through which we rediscover what it means to inhabit the world.