joseph scissorhands: Antony Gormley: Body Politic

Sunday 3 December 2023

Antony Gormley: Body Politic

‘The responsibility of the art of our time is to reflect on and provide instruments for examination and self-awareness.’ - Antony Gormley.

Body Politic represents yet another great body of work, exercises in line, form and the occupation of space by sculptor Antony Gormley (previously here and here), presented at White Cube Bermondsey. Again Gormley examines the ways in which the architecture of the human frame can be placed within and react against the man-made architecture of the built environment. These hard-edged, geometric bodies composed of rusted metal, terracotta brick and concrete sit quite comfortably within the cool, stark, white and grey environs of the White Cube gallery spaces. My favourite sculptures were those constructed from rusted brown squared rods which comprise the figures of the Test series in the last gallery. These figurative sculptures were interested solely in interacting with the walls or support columns of the space, oblivious to the presence of the visitor. Bind, in the first gallery space was another favourite. I enjoyed the complex tangle of geometric lines of this linear figure constrained and bisected by a series of physical vertical and horizontal axes. These supporting lines extended the figure to the ceiling, walls and floor restricting the movement of the viewer around the figure. Again the minimalism of the piece set in a vast space was what appealed. The vast gallery containing a sea of lounging terracotta figures which comprise the sprawling Resting Place installation will no doubt be a hit, flooding numerous Instagram feeds. Linking each individual gallery room is the long narrow gallery aisle which runs the length of the building and contains a series of concrete cuboid works entitled the Retreat series. The last of these is a reclining figure which looks to have been strongly influenced by the pre-Colombian Mesoamerican Chac Mool sculptures. In the gallery shop just before you leave the building are a few of Gormley's lovely, loose ink drawings whose beauty and fluidity lies in direct contrast to the hard-edged geometric constructs of his latest sculptures.