This will be the first major presentation of Antony Gormley’s work in China. At its core is Critical Mass II (1995) an installation of 60 life-size cast iron body forms. This seminal work has been widely exhibited in Europe, but this will be its first showing in Asia. Some of the body forms are installed in a linear progression, in positions from foetal to stargazing recalling the ‘ascent of man’.Some are suspended in arrested fall, others lie scattered across the space or form a jumbled pile.This multiple work celebrates the sculptural body as object and ground for feeling and engages our deepest hopes and fears; our attraction to light as well as to darkness.
The exhibition also includes spatial works that attempt to create instruments of proprioception. Breathing Room (2012) is an environment made ofnesting photo-luminescent space frames all containing the same volume, but stretched in different directions. Ten minutes of darkness are interrupted by 40 seconds of blinding light. Its virtual, abstract architecture invites the viewer to look at it as an object and engage with it as a subject, providing both a soothing and confrontational experience.
A new work, Passage II(2017),is a 15.5 metre-long tunnel, whose shape is modelled on a standing human form. It too is both object and experience, suggesting a correlative for the interior of the body and offering a journey into darkness and the unknown.
Four additional suspended sculptures (2008 – 2012), function like drawings in space, each transforming mass into energy and object into field to reveal an open body-space at its core. In these dematerialised works the bodies are free and weightless – evoking a state of being rather than illustrating an action.
Drawing has always been the fertile core of the artist’s work and this exhibition will include a wide selection of work on paper from 1981 – 2016. The drawings and prints exhibited here chart intimate movements of the hand andimpressions of the body and forms that result from an interaction between the behaviour of materials and intuition. The works possess an immediacy, range and intensity that is the result of immersion in time and substance.
With Still Moving, Antony Gormley offers an exhibition which interacts with the unique architecture of the Long Museum to create a test site for both the work and the viewer, while introducing the major themes that have concerned him over the last 40 years: body as space and space as object.
About the Artist
Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.
Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Forte di Belvedere, Florence (2015); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2014); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia (2012); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2012); The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (2011); KunsthausBregenz, Austria (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1993) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (1989). Permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Inside Australia (Lake Ballard, Western Australia) Exposure (Lelystad, The Netherlands) and Chord (MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA).
Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007, the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and the PraemiumImperiale in 2013. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year’s Honours list in 2014. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003.
