Antony Gormley

In the work of sculptor Antony Gormley, it is the space generated by the placement of figures in a field of vision that is the artistic matter, not the representation of the human form in the figures themselves. Our architectural experience of the engendered space provides the experience of movement in the work. The previous tradition of attempting to represent movement in the static figure that culminates in Rodin’s superimposition of muscular micro-movements in not touched on here. Gormley’s humanoid forms represent bodily movement barely at all…just enough to summon a haptic response from the viewer…just enough to set the viewer into resonance with the figured space.

A more subtle theme in Gormley’s work is oscillation and patterning in material processes and how spatial reorganization re-contextualizes them (consider his reorganized trees). When Gormley turns to working with the figure there is already a complex interplay of time, space, place, and affect.