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Gormley moves into the city for his latest creations, treating buildings as ‘geological environment’ |
Gormley’s turning to high art at home
After making his mark around Britain and the world, one of our best-known sculptors is back, writes Ed Cumming
ANTONY Gormley’s art has led him all over the world – to South-East Asia, to China, to Venice, to Gateshead – but it is fitting that London should finally see a major exhibition of his.
Born in Hampstead, Mr Gormley has lived in Camden for almost all of his professional life, and his state-of-the-art studio is a short but dramatic walk away in King’s Cross.
“I suppose I first moved to Camden for Romany’s (the hardware store),” he explains with a laugh, “but then it moved.”
He retains a lot of affection for the borough.
“It’s good because it’s tribal,” he says. “It always has been, I think, though there’s less mohicans than there used to be.
“It has the texture of everyday life. It’s got its own energy – it’s cosmopolitan without being chic.”
Local institutions feature high on Gormley’s list of favourite things.
He says: “I like the Jazz Café, I like the canal. I used to like the Camden Palais but I haven’t been since it’s been Koko. The High Street’s great – it’s common ground. It feels like it could be a village high street – it’s rough and ready.”
But despite his urbane familiarity, moving into the city for a new work, Event Horizon, marks a significant change of artistic direction for the sculptor whose most famous works, The Angel of the North and Another Place, are both set in large expanses of open countryside – in the latter case on Crosby Beach near Liverpool.
Mr Gormley warmly acknowledges the difference: “It’s the same old body, just in different places. They’ve always interacted with their surroundings.”
Event Horizon features his distinctive human casts set out all over the rooftops of London, viewable from a special gallery in the Hayward.
It is an impressive spectacle, at once alienating and moving.
“The figures have always been isolated, but I wanted to convey the topography of London as if it was a rural setting.
“I treated building as if it were geological environment – I’m trying to balance the experience with objecthood – I have always seen my works as places, rather than things.
“I want people to look out over London with the same innocent eyes as, say, a goatherd looking for chamois in the Alps.” He laughs – “actually, maybe those eyes aren’t so innocent.”
As well as Event Horizon, the exhibition features a number of new and old works exploring the architectural aspects of the human form.
One of the most striking is Blind Light (which is also the title of the Hayward exhibition), a glass room filled with mist and bright white light. Visitors walk into the room and become unable to see, though they are visible in silhouette on the outside.
“The viewer becomes the view”, Mr Gormley explains. “They can’t see anything, so they become consciousness in a field of materialised light. People are either comforted or terrified – not knowing where you are leads you to uncertainty about who you are.”
The architecture of the body is related to the physical architecture of the buildings and rooms we inhabit: “Inside and outside are simultaneously separated and connected – windows and doors are very important, as is light.”
It is these things which explore the “private space of the other”, the subject of most of Mr Gormley’s works.
The show has become the hot-ticket of the summer exhibitions – while it divides opinion his work has always been simultaneously democratic and personal.
Some have described Blind Light as a “retrospective”, something the artist rejects: “It’s not a retrospective. I think a retrospective is something that can happen after the artist is dead. There are 10 old works, and 35 drawings, introduced amongst the new stuff.”
He seems to delight in the challenge of progress: “It’s new work to push things forward. You’ve gotta keep ’em on their toes”, he says. And then he has to go – “to strip naked and be cast”.
It is the official opening day of the exhibition, and he is already moving on.
It is ironic, perhaps, given the brooding, monolithic nature of his figures, but nobody could accuse Antony Gormley of keeping still.
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