July 05, 2007
Antony Gormley
The Body in Space
Antony Gormley at The Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London until August 9, 2007.
"The body is our first habitation, the building our second. I wanted to use the form of this second body, architecture, to make concentrated volumes out of a personal space that carries the memory of an absent self, articulated through measurement … Bodies and buildings, cities and cells, monuments and intimacies, each of the “rooms ” in (allotment) is someone’s, is connected to the moving body of an individual, alive and breathing."
'Architecture is supposed to be the location of security and certainty about where you are. It is supposed to protect you from the weather, from darkness, from uncertainty. Blind Light undermines all of that. You enter his interior space that is the equivalent of being on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea. It is very important for me that inside it you find the outside. Also you become the immersed figure in an endless ground, literally the subject of the work.’ - Antony Gormley
From the exhibtion website:
Taking the body as its point of departure, the exhibition is an invitation to embark on a journey through different kinds of space. New works include Blind Light: lose yourself in light and vapour in this cloud-filled glass room that is cold, wet and disorientating; a spectacular series of suspended figures in light-infused webs of steel; and a colossal 27-ton structure, Space Station, that tilts precariously, dominating the gallery space.
The exhibition extends beyond the confines of the gallery with Event Horizon, an ambitious urban artwork featuring around 30 sculptural casts of the artist’s body on rooftops and public always across central London, subtly punctuating the city skyline. Spanning outwards from The Hayward, all the figures face towards the gallery’s three sculpture terraces, which form the main viewing platforms for the project as a whole. [via pruned]
Posted by jo at July 5, 2007 06:06 PM
