Antony Gormley: You and Nothing

Xavier Hufkens is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works by the English sculptor Antony Gormley. The new exhibition will be his fourth at the gallery.

Since the beginning of his career in the late seventies, Antony Gormley (° 1950, London) has consistently taken the human body as the central, most exclusive medium for his art. A significant work for him is, by definition, a place in the world, like the body that is inhabited by the spectator or the artist.

Gormley has become a sculptor because only sculpture is able to apprehend the world through the body, the first of all places, thus confronting the individual with the matter of his or her own life. His sculptures are not representations or allegories of the human figure but try to embody its inner place. They are not added to the space where they are positioned; they make or become that space. Gormley uses sculpture to establish a link between the inner and outer worlds, to constantly revisit the realms of the inside and the outside.

Antony Gormley has created some of the most ambitious and recognisable works of the past two decades including Field, The Angel of the North and Quantum Cloud for the Millennium Dome in Greenwich. In Belgium, people will certainly remember Another Place, hundred iron statues rising from the sand along the long coastal strip of De Panne on the occasion of 2003 Beaufort. This Summer, Antony Gormley is presenting Time Horizon at the Archeological Park of Scolacium in Borgia, Catanzaro, Italy. Between the olive trees and the ancient ruins of the Park, the artist has created an installation of 100 sculptures in iron, copies of his body that express the processes of respiration.

On the occasion of his new exhibition at the gallery, Antony Gormley will present a number of new works. Some include human bodies made from unbroken loops of 6 mm square steel wire. They do not refer directly to the corporeal relations between mass and space but describe the body as a field of energy emanating from core to outer space. Gormley has referred to his works as “diagnostic instruments” to help orient the mind between the inner conditions of the body and the infinite extensions of deep space.