'The exhibition reminds you in a very physical way that everything is connected': How Britain’s greatest sculptor engages with the world
The largest solo exhibition of Antony Gormley's work in continental Europe prompts Charlotte Mullins to ask how an artist engages with the world when their work is located outside of the gallery.
We all know the shape of Antony Gormley. Life-size iron sculptures based on casts of his own body navigate the quicksand on Merseyside’s Crosby Beach and wade through the Water of Leith in Edinburgh. Solitary sentinels from his 100-strong series Another Time stand around the world, from the hillsides of the Kunisaki peninsula in Japan to the subaqueous loading bay of Folkestone Harbour.
Now, in Antwerp, Belgium, another three figures based on the sculptor’s own body look out over the city. But these are nebulous as clouds, mere whispers of bodies. As they stand overlooking Antwerp’s River Scheldt and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA) the city and sky permeate them, connecting the figures directly to the fragile world they inhabit.
Lose yourself in Gormley's iconic sculptures and monumental installations in the largest solo exhibition of his work in continental Europe.
Gormley frequently using his own body as the foundation for his casts.
These three Domain sculptures are part of Gormley’s wide-ranging exhibition at KMSKA, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. While they were made specifically for Antwerp, the show also features some of his earliest works from his student days at the Slade School of Art in London. Christov-Bakargiev is an expert on Italian Arte Povera and she teases out Gormley’s early interest in materiality; land art and ecology emerge as early progenitors too.
Gormley’s first works used materials to explore his relationship to the natural world. In Flat Tree (1978), a slender larch has been sliced thinly into a carpet of concentric wood circles, while in Exercise Between Blood and Earth (1979/2026) the outline of a running man in red chalk expands like tree rings across the gallery wall. Gormley soon began to use his own body as a mould, creating a snug tomb out of sliced bread. He took plaster-casts of himself in order to make lead and iron sculptures that asked us to consider our own place in the world.
Since the 1970s Gormley has listed air as one of the materials he works with. It fills the interior of his lead body-cast Tree (1984) and was one of the three components in Land Sea and Air I (1979). These stone-shaped lead sculptures are variously filled with rock, water and air. Gormley asks us to contemplate volume and mass in this impossible game of three-card monte, and to think about what is known and what can only be imagined. Which holds the rock? Which is filled with air?
Five Gormley works to see in the UK
Sculpture for Derry Walls, 1987, Derry
In 1987, Gormley installed three sculptures on the fortified walls that surround Derry in Northern Ireland. One remains in place today. It is an iron cast of two identical male figures standing back-to-back, arms outstretched. The crucifixion pose suggests a religious reading, but it also nods to The Troubles’ armed patrols.
Angel of the North, 1998, near Gateshead
England’s most iconic sculpture is nearly 30 years old. Its cortensteel body and wings soar over the A1(M) trunk road near Gateshead. People travel from all over the world to stand beneath it, but at 66ft tall and with a wingspan of 177ft, it can be seen for miles around.
Quantum Cloud, 2000, London
Installed by the ‘Dome’ in London to mark the country’s millennial celebrations, the 98-foot sculpture now greets those who visit the O2. Countless steel bars coalesce to suggest a human form at its centre before dissolving into a formless cloud at the outer edges.
6 Times, 2010 (reinstalled 2019), Edinburgh
Six cast-iron life-size figures punctuate a scenic walk from Edinburgh along the Water of Leith. Sculptures appear knee-deep in the river, floating on the surface and standing on the edge of Leith docks.
Another Time XVIII, 2013, Loading Bay, Folkestone
Another Time XXI, 2013, Fulsam Rock, Margate
These two life-size cast-iron figures, initially installed for the 2017 Folkestone Triennial, stand at the sea’s edge and are submerged with every high tide. They are part of a series of 100 sculptures, all cast from Gormley’s own body, that are installed across the world.
It is Gormley’s early interest in air, our invisible life force, that occupies him again today. His sculptural casts have morphed from solid bodies, such as the Angel of the North (1998), to those constructed from slender steel spars. The Domain sculptures that stand under Antwerp’s wide skies are barely there. They are lit only by the sun and so as dusk approaches — what Gormley calls the ‘magic hour’ — the figures dissolve into the cityscape. Weather and air currents pass right through them as they observe the Scheldt, Antwerp’s wide, deep river on which the city’s 16th-century fortune was built.
These sculptures are based on Gormley’s own body, but it is your body as a viewer that is activated in this exhibition. The first work you encounter is Orbit Field III (2026), a room-sized mass of looping aluminium tubes. Gormley’s lifelong fascination with what it means to be a body in space is passed on to the viewer as you physically climb through it. The activation of your body culminates in the last room, where you are confronted by the 42-ton Cave. First created for his 2019 exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, this monumental sculpture is a supine body made of interlocking geometric forms. It is architectural in scale, a breathtaking mass of weathering steel. And you are invited to venture inside it.
Bent double you enter through the ‘foot’. It is dark — solidly so — and you have to grope your way along until you reach a small chamber with a slender shaft of light. It is like entering a prehistoric passage tomb, where light only reaches inside on the solstice. You bend lower, walking further into the body. You are deeply aware of your own heartbeat, your lungs breathing in and out. Suddenly the walls dip away and you are standing in a lofty void, looking up through the bent ‘knee’ towards the light. You can see the exit; your breath settles.
As you leave you have to pass again through Orbit Field. The air now seems charged somehow. You become aware of it passing through the sculptures outside, passing over you. The exhibition reminds you in a very physical way that everything in this world is connected, although sometimes the bonds are invisible.
'Antony Gormley: Geestgrond', is on until September 20, 2026. Visit the KMSKA website for more information and to book tickets.
