Martin Caiger-Smith’s huge monograph on Antony Gormley slides out of its slipcase appropriately enough like a block of cast iron. In its beautiful rust-coloured linen covers it looks a bit like a block of cast iron, too. Open it to the endpapers, ‘Bodies in Space’, and black splatters across a white ground. Turn a couple of thick, silky pages and a frail human figure, photographed from behind, is silhouetted on a rocky precipice facing an abyss of roiling water, cloud and spray. Keep turning and the developing story of Gormley’s life’s work reveals itself in image after remarkable image.
In the 1980s Gormley was almost alone among contemporary sculptors in turning to the human form as his source of inspiration, his ambition to ‘find again the place of the body in the space created for art by modernism’. For nearly 40 years he has pursued this idea, developing and evolving a language of his own that has moved from beaten lead body cases, soldered and seamed and hollow, to solid cast iron forms; the body explored inwards, pierced, projected outwards, re-imagined in blocks, in steel rods, expanded, contracted, condensed and atomised.
And as the sculpture has developed so too has Gormley’s discourse with the world, with people and with place.
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