Antony Gormley asks how can still, silent objects cause us to move and be moved. In BODY FIELD, Gormley invites us to bring our own physical presence into a field of 'sculpture as an instrument for awareness'.
Immediately upon entering the gallery, the artist's proposition is clear: the open end of a 155-metre-long steel tube lies on the floor in dialogue with a dark opening in a concrete bunker. Behind it, a drawing evokes the cosmic darkness of a black hole. Taken together, these three works acknowledge the body as a place, materialise its inner tensions, and affirm its need for shelter.
The sculptural installation RUN III (2022) is both activating and activated: it transforms the architectural space but, at the same time, is animated by human interaction. The sculpture is a line that weaves through the gallery with horizontals at the domestic heights of chairs and tables, windowsills and ceilings, so that our familiarity with its geometry is both triggered and confused. By re-presenting our built world, RUN III allows us to walk through walls whilst becoming aware of how architecture encourages and enforces particular forms of bodily choreography.
CORNER (2022)—what the artist has called a concrete 'bunker for one'—is the first of two works that bookend the exhibition. Like its companion piece on the gallery's third floor, the sculpture was created from digital scans of Gormley's body as he crouched isolated in space or was compressed into a corner, identifying a human space in space at large. A single square opening—almost equivalent to the size of the steel tube of RUN III—is the solitary clue that these structures are hollow. Like compact dwellings, these works allude to the body as a house, acknowledging its dual nature as a space of refuge and imprisonment. This is a place where the body can be bound but the mind set free.
Corresponding visually to the linear language of RUN III and in an extraordinary feat of casting, a group of Knotwork sculptures take the notion of three-dimensional mapping from building to body. Whereas RUN III allows us to calibrate our physical relationship to the architectural receptacle of a building or room, the tighter, denser pathways of these works chart the interior of the human body. These 'maps of the interior' show evidence of internal pressure and tension in the brain, heart, stomach and knees, capturing moments of lived time within the body.
Throughout the exhibition, carefully placed drawings provide interpretational clues to the sculptures. They invite us to connect our proprioceptive intuition about the inner places of the body with the infinite darkness of an expanding universe or the plotted points of an oil field.
In a radical departure from Gormley's normal practice of isolating a single body in space, the new Double Blockworks in the gallery's lower level evoke mitosis, or the division and replication of cells that guarantees the continuance of life. In making this series, Gormley reflected upon Michelangelo's final unfinished sculpture—the Rondanini Pietà (1552–64)—as a metaphor for the relationship between the sculptor and his material, life and death. Many of the Double Blockworks are based on scans of the artist clasping a previously made blockwork: an acknowledgement of his relationship with the art of sculpture. For the artist, the doubled figures embody 'matter as a continual dance of possibility between emergence and entropy, the acknowledgement of instability and inevitable jeopardy, but, at the same time, connection, the need to stand and to hold—to touch the world, the future, another body'.
The most extensive exhibition of Gormley's work in Germany to date will open at the Lehmbruck Museum in September 2022 in dialogue with the work Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Recent solo exhibitions include Voorlinden, Wassenaar (2022); National Gallery Singapore (2021); Royal Academy, London (2019); Island of Delos, Greece (2019); Busan Museum of Art (2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2019); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2019); Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (2018); Long Museum, Shanghai (2017); The National Portrait Gallery, London (2016). He has participated in the Venice Biennale (1982 and 1986) and documenta 8 (1987). Permanent public works include Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Inside Australia (Lake Ballard, Western Australia) and Exposure (Lelystad, The Netherlands).
These works were born out of a resistance to values associated with the sovereign self and individualism. When we say we are close to somebody, it's both a metaphor and literal: about a shared sense of ease in a shared imaginative space.
Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human being stands in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.
Xavier Hufkens is one of Europe’s leading galleries for contemporary art. Located in Brussels, the gallery maintains a diverse exhibition programme with solo exhibitions of the gallery artists as well as group exhibitions and special projects. The gallery deals in a distinctive combination of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video and installation-based work.
The origins of the gallery date back to 1987, when Xavier Hufkens opened a gallery space in an un-refurbished warehouse in the neighbourhood of the South Station (Midi) in Brussels. During the early years, the focus of the gallery was upon mid-career and emerging artists and the gallery is known for having introduced some of the most influential contemporary artists to Brussels at a time when they were still relatively unknown. British sculptor Antony Gormley, who is still affiliated with the gallery, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Rosemarie Trockel all showed in Belgium for the first time with Xavier Hufkens (Gormley in 1987; Gonzalez-Torres in 1991 and Trockel in 1993).
In 1992, the gallery moved to a 19th-century townhouse at 6 rue Saint-Georges, close to the Avenue Louise. Completely renovated by Belgian architects Paul Robbrecht, Hilde Daem and Marie-José Van Hee, the house quickly gained a reputation for being not just one of the most beautiful contemporary art spaces in the Belgian capital, but also one of the most interesting. The expanded exhibition programme coincided with the additional representation of a number of established artists from Belgium and abroad, including Richard Artschwager, Thierry De Cordier and Jan Vercruysse. In 1997, Hufkens expanded the gallery further by annexing the adjacent building and a number of new artists joined the gallery, including Louise Bourgeois, Roni Horn and Thomas Houseago.
A second space in the same street, at 107 rue Saint-Georges, opened in spring 2013. Located in the Galerie Rivoli, a mixed-use commercial development from the 1970s, the new gallery space was designed by Swiss architect Harry Gugger, who was previously in partnership with Herzog and De Meuron. Slegten & Toegemann, Brussels, managed the project. A third space opened in spring 2020, located at 44 Rue Van Eyck, designed by architect Bernard Dubois.
An eclectic but very clear vision underpins all of the gallery’s activities: 'The definition of the gallery was established from the start. The common thread, then and now, is quality over and above everything else, which I find more intellectually challenging than a forced definition. From the early days I juxtaposed established artists such as Michelangelo Pistoletto with someone like Felix Gonzalez-Torres when he was totally unknown. Today I still mix my work: I have no problem showing Malcolm Morley … alongside Robert Ryman, or Willem de Kooning.' [Xavier Hufkens in The Art Newspaper, Issue 220, January 2011, published online: 20 January 2011]
Xavier Hufkens represents some thirty artists from different generations. He was part of the six-member selection committee for Art Basel during seven years and also participates in up to five international Arts Fairs annually. The gallery has partnerships with the estates of Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Robert Mapplethorpe and Alice Neel.
