A cast of Antony Gormley? Or a pair of giant conkers? Gormley’s RA show reviewed

While Sir Joshua Reynolds, on his plinth, was looking the other way, a little girl last Saturday morning was trying to prise a littler sculpture from the pavement of the Royal Academy’s courtyard. For all its tininess — from a distance the sculpture’s curvy lumps, 12 x 28 x 17cm, resemble horse droppings a security guard might dig into their rose bed — she couldn’t shift it.

‘Iron Baby’ (1999) is a solid iron cast made by Sir Antony Gormley of his six-day- old daughter abased before the Enlightenment temple of art, buttocks facing Piccadilly in eloquent critique. But for the Instagramming hordes, you might step over her heedlessly on the way to the exhibition, a survey of Gormley’s works from the late 1970s to today.

Many of the 69-year-old’s career-long preoccupations are inside — the dialectics of tough vs tender, bodily erotics vs rational geometries, void vs the infinitely dense, body in space as against body of space — but no more so than in this abandoned baby outside.