Antony Gormley: Geestgrond Solo exhibition at KMSKA, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp

In Geestgrond, presented at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA), Antony Gormley brings together over 100 works spanning more than four decades. Sculptures in clay, stone, wood, glass, bread, iron, lead, and steel trace the evolution of a practice that persistently asks what it means to be a body in the world. Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, this comprehensive exhibition presents Gormley’s work in dialogue with both the architecture of the museum and works by artists including Ensor, Rodin, González and medieval and other works from the collection of KMSKA. 

Installed throughout the museum and extending beyond it, Geestgrond unfolds as a continuous spatial experience rather than a sequence of isolated galleries. It reveals Gormley’s sustained contribution to contemporary sculpture and his ongoing investigation of the body as a site of knowledge — grounded, vulnerable, and relational — at a time of radical technological transformation.

The exhibition’s title, Geestgrond, refuses the split between the spiritual and the material, the human and the planetary. Combining the Dutch words geest (spirit, mind, breath) with grond (earth, soil, foundation), the term binds weight to thought and matter to spirit, grounding what thinks and giving density to what seems immaterial. Both linguistic and geological, Geestgrond also evokes the sandy, Ice Age–formed terrains, native to the Low Countries, shaped through long cultivation and care.