GAIL
THEIS
Gormley’s exhibition at the Royal Academy focussed on the figure in its space. There were many rooms filled with an assortment of three-dimensional and two-dimensional images.
Firstly, a room full of steel forms made up of various sized cubes, both vertical and horizontal, which despite their abstraction were identifiable as human.
A second room contained a suspended steel wire cube. Moving towards its centre the wire becomes increasingly dense and the cube more opaque.
Another room was filled with his signature life size male figures, suspended from the ceiling, cantilevered on the walls as well as on the floor, inviting you to walk between them, giving the feeling as if a visitor may become part of the exhibition.
Antony Gormley
There were concrete blocks, where once there been a body inside the space and now there was the negative impression where hands on one side and feet on the other, reminiscent of Pompeii, reaching out of the stone tomb. Peering in to see what shape lay between it was hard to define and yet there was space in the centre suggesting a body's past presence.
We walked crouching through giant dark steel boxes with tantalising slivers of light, glimpsed in strategic corners, enabling the visitor to reconnect with the present and tangible.