Antony Gormley's exhibition Body Politic (22 November 2023–28 January 2024) is the latest Herculean show to take over Jay Jopling's White Cube in Bermondsey.
A task nearly as mammoth as Anselm's Kiefer's Finnegan's Wake (2023) earlier in the year, Gormley's studio and White Cube's curatorial team individually ferried out five discrete bodies of works: Resting Place (2023), Stand (2023), 'Retreat' (2022–2023), 'Weave Works' (2021–2023), and Bind (2023).
Walking among Resting Place's sea of 244 terracotta figures, although some arrangements appear similar, there are no two poses the same. Blocks come in 20 different sizes and three main colours—the darker the block, the longer it remained in the kiln. This dense urban landscape of figures conjures images of his 1993 installation Field for the British Isles, a terracotta army of 40,000 in the North Gallery for Contemporary Art (NGCA) in Sunderland. It attests to his long-running exploration of the self and other, he said when and where, 'while using the language of the built environment; the language of the world that asks us to conform to it.'
Entrances around the gallery have been shrunk, restricting visitor flows to one in-one out. Entering each new space to contemplate the sculptures feels like a ritual.
Four thick steel ribbons—one front, one back, and one left, and one right—fix the work Bind (2023) within White Cube's South Gallery I. On close inspection, visitors will notice it wears the blemishes of unfinished welding, hinting at the sculpture's future removal and installation somewhere new.
