Tuesday 18 December 2012

Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley is a British sculptor, best known for The Angel of the North. His work mostly focuses on the human figure, often using his own body as a cast to make lead and steel figures.


(http://www.picturesofgateshead.co.uk/angel_of_the_north/index.html)



Here are some of his sculpture works and installations that I think represent the 'divorce between body and soul' that we are going to aim to create in our own space.
I think the twisted wire inside the human form could represent the inner turmoil of a person, they can look perfectly clam on the outside but swirling round within them can be a mass of confusion, hatred or aggravation.

 STANDING MATTER, GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC, SALZBURG, AUSTRIA, 2003
STANDING MATTER, GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC, SALZBURG, AUSTRIA, 2003
 FOREIGN BODIES, XAVIER HUFKENS, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, 2002
FOREIGN BODIES, XAVIER HUFKENS, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, 2002
 CLEARING, WHITE CUBE, LONDON, ENGLAND, 2004


This installation within a room is also interesting, the twisted metal that fills the room could also represent a twisted, warped mind or soul of a person that the audience has to find their way through.

CLEARING, WHITE CUBE, LONDON, ENGLAND, 2004
NEW WORKS, SEAN KELLY GALLERY, NEW YORK, USA, 2005
CLEARING, GALERIE NORDENHAKE, BERLIN, GERMANY, 2004
SPACETIME, GALLERIA MIMMO SCOGNAMIGLIO, NAPLES, ITALY, 2007
 
 
 
This installation called Blind Light is an enclosed space filled with dry ice and white light, so much so that once you have entered the box it is impossible to even see a hands reach in front of you. The feeling of lost confusion that I imagine one would feel is inspiring for our space. Instead of creating a confusing feel we are aiming to make our audience feel a rotten almost disguisted feel, something that is a complete contrast to the exterior of our space.
BLIND LIGHT, SEAN KELLY GALLERY, NEW YORK, USA, 2007
 
A contrast between a space and its contents. I think this piece is beautiful, not massively related but i really like it.
 FLARE II, SALISBURY CATHEDRAL, SALISBURY, ENGLAND, 2011 - 2012
 
 There is a current exhibition of Gormley's at The White Cube in Bermonsey which would be really interesting to go to and could be quite relavent:
 
 
 
Challenging the physical possibilities of the gallery space, this ambitious exhibition investigates our experience of architecture through the body, and of the body through architecture.
Made in direct response to the space of the South Gallery II is the vast, new work MODEL, which is also the title of the exhibition.  Fabricated from 100 tonnes of weathering sheet steel, the work is both sculpture and building, human in form but at no point visible as a total figure.  Visitors will be able to enter the work through a 'foot' and journey through its inter-connected internal chambers, the sculpture demanding that we adjust our pace and bend our bodies to its awkward yet absolute geometry. The experience of this analogy for the 'dark interior of the body' is guided by anticipation and memory and the direct and indirect light which penetrates the structure and which leads us on, as if through a labyrinth.
The exhibition also includesa room of models - trials mostly made in the year leading up to the exhibition but including some examples from as far back as ten years ago. The room presents a dialogue between dwelling in the body and dwelling in a building and explores the potential of sculture as a form of psychological, reflexive architecture.

There are frames, solid plaster casts and architectural models that map the darkness of the body. Some of the blockworks shown in the corridor have counterparts in the model room, where their solid masses become hollow and form complex interiors. Three models for the interconnecting chambers of the large work MODEL are shown. Throughout the objects and drawings here there is a dialogue between extension and expansion, where the scale of the body is taken as a variable.

The room is a laboratory of possibility, showing the ways in which ideas cross-fertilisze and produce ever more vigorous hybrids. It gives an insight into the workings of the studio as an open-ended exploratory playground in which space and object become interchangeable. 
 
 
I'm going to try and get to it before we start back at uni.
 
 
 
  

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