Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Antony Gormley

His great diaspora of body-casts often has the very opposite effect on the viewer than the one its maker intends

issue 30 June 2018

Antony Gormley has replicated again. Every year or so a new army of his other selves — cast, or these days 3-D fabricated, in bronze, iron, steel — emerge from his workshop. Some lucky clones find themselves in wild and beautiful places; others are trapped in private collections.

The latest clutch, generation 2018, find themselves in the new galleries at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (until 27 August), one sticking out horizontally from a wall, another, an airy stack of steel bars, staring down through a window into town. It’s called ‘Subject’, this work (also the title of the exhibition), and Gormley’s intention is that it acts as an invitation to each gallery-goer to pause; to become aware of themselves as subjects too. These are not figures, so goes the idea, but representations of, and triggers for, an interior mental state.

Well, ‘Subject’ has made me aware, but perhaps not quite in the way the artist intends.

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