Antony Gormley 'The exhibition reminds you in a very physical way that everything is connected'

By Charlotte Mullins

We all know the shape of Antony Gormley. Life-size iron sculptures based on casts of his own body navigate the quicksand on Merseyside’s Crosby Beach and wade through the Water of Leith in Edinburgh. Solitary sentinels from his 100-strong series Another Time stand around the world, from the hillsides of the Kunisaki peninsula in Japan to the subaqueous loading bay of Folkestone Harbour.

Now, in Antwerp, Belgium, another three figures based on the sculptor’s own body look out over the city. But these are nebulous as clouds, mere whispers of bodies. As they stand overlooking Antwerp’s River Scheldt and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA) the city and sky permeate them, connecting the figures directly to the fragile world they inhabit.

These three Domain sculptures are part of Gormley’s wide-ranging exhibition at KMSKA, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. While they were made specifically for Antwerp, the show also features some of his earliest works from his student days at the Slade School of Art in London. Christov-Bakargiev is an expert on Italian Arte Povera and she teases out Gormley’s early interest in materiality; land art and ecology emerge as early progenitors too.

Gormley’s first works used materials to explore his relationship to the natural world. In Flat Tree (1978), a slender larch has been sliced thinly into a carpet of concentric wood circles, while in Exercise Between Blood and Earth (1979/2026) the outline of a running man in red chalk expands like tree rings across the gallery wall. Gormley soon began to use his own body as a mould, creating a snug tomb out of sliced bread. He took plaster-casts of himself in order to make lead and iron sculptures that asked us to consider our own place in the world.