Antony Gormley Learning to be

From 13 June 2021, the SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen will present a comprehensive solo exhibition of works by the internationally acclaimed British sculptor Antony Gormley (b 1950, London), the most significant survey of the artist’s work ever to take place in Germany. Gormley is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, recipient of the Turner Prize and the Praemium Imperiale. The presentation will bring together 30 works from the artist's studio as well as the Schaufler collection, including works on view to the public for the first time.

Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. The central subject of his work is the human being’s relation to space and time. Using his own body as material, tool and subject, he makes evocations of a variety of states: exposure, isolation, emergence and growth, all evidenced in this exhibition. Early works such as the FLAT TREE (1978) and ONE APPLE (1982), show Gormley's interest in time and how its duration can be revealed.

Some of the works are encased, others are more open and permeable. The continual questioning of where a body begins and ends is investigated in sculptures that evolve from void to mass, line to plane, rectilinear to organic form and structure: from the almost weightless linear “drawing in space” of FLARE II (2008), through the dense mass of, CUMULATE (BREATHE II) (2018), via the room-sized enclosed darkness of HOLD (2016).). Three large-scale architectonic works, ROOM (1980), HOLD (2016) and MURMUR (2014), take centre stage, mediating between the individual space of the body and the collective space through the agency of all forms of shelter, from clothes to architecture.

After the project was postponed last year due to the pandemic, the artist is thrilled about its implementation as from June 2021: “I'm delighted to be making this exhibition in the distinctive former industrial buildings of the SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen with its spacious and open rooms, filled with natural light from above.”

The exhibition forefronts Gormley’s transformation of sculpture from purely material and formal issues into an exploration of life itself. “Its subject is as much to do with our own bodies and their relationship to the sculptures as it is to do with the works themselves: the body as a container, as an energy field, as an aggregate of parts, as a provisional stack, as a mass, as a neural network.”