Antony Gormley
18.9 1993 – 31.10 1993
As early as the spring of 1993, the practical preparations began for Antony Gormley’s exhibition at Malmö Konsthall. In collaboration with the Folk High School in Östra Grevie and the three local brick factories, 40,000 hand-sized clay figures were produced. When placed across the floor of the art hall, this astonishing multitude—each one an individual—became a dominant feature of the exhibition: a field of humanlike yet enigmatic figures titled “The European Field”.
Also striking was the series of large, swollen cast iron sculptures that Antony Gormley presented for the first time at Malmö Konsthall. Two were suspended from the ceiling, one placed right at the entrance, and one outside the art hall. In these heavy, expanding works—based on the artist’s own body—the immediate surrounding “life space” had also been materialized in iron.
It was in India that Antony Gormley became an artist. He lived there for three years to study meditation under the spiritual teacher Goenka—a form of meditation that concentrates human consciousness into a timeless experience of the self within one’s own body. When Antony Gormley returned to his native England (b. 1950 in Hampstead), it was during a time when discussions around art were largely focused on language and the question of which detour to art was the “right” one. It is therefore not surprising that his commitment to corporeality and the physically tangible means of sculpture was immediately noticed.
It was with his hollow lead sculptures that Antony Gormley had his international breakthrough, notably participating in the seventh Documenta in Kassel in 1982 with casts of his own body in various vulnerable positions. These figures were sealed off, protected by a repellent shell, yet at the same time exposed and defenseless—meditative and confrontational all at once. Several of these lead sculptures were included in what was, at the time, the most extensive exhibition of Antony Gormley’s work, along with a selection of his later cement sculptures, in which the body is entirely encased.
