ANTONY GORMLEY: AERIAL
White Cube is pleased to announces AERIAL by Antony Gormley. The exhibition features two recent developments in Gormley’s practice: one explores physical proximity in mass and scale, where two over-life-size bodies merge as one, while the other endeavours to catalyse space almost without mass.
April 30 - June 15, 2024
Aerial (2023), the work from which the show takes its title, manifests an orthogonal matrix that both measures and activates the architecture of the ground floor gallery in which it is contained. Built from a descending scale of solid aluminium bars that end in delicate elements referred to by the artist as ‘whiskers’, Aerial creates a zone of dispersed energy that interacts with light.
The work kindles an understanding of space not as an emptiness isolating one object from another, but rather as a place that exists within and through objects. ‘You could think of this work as the root hair of the made world’, notes Gormley, ‘or as the antenna of architecture, perhaps even the whiskers of the room that allow us to sense space and the room to sense us.’
Upstairs, three solid cast iron ‘Big Double Blockworks’ (all 2023) explore physical intimacy through a radically reduced geometric language. Departing from Gormley’s earlier explorations of doubled forms, which focused on the organic mitotic duplication of his own body, these works refer to the orthogonal geometry of architecture – what Gormley calls our ‘second body’ – and use its physical language, rather than pure line, to form mass.
In Big Sidle (2023) and Big Bare (2023), two upright bodies composed of stacked blocks converge into a singular mass, sharing a single load path, the precarity of both paradoxically creating the stability of the final form. Gormley’s ‘Big Double Blockworks’ evoke the intrinsic need for support and intimacy.
Executed in various media, including carbon, casein and walnut ink, these drawings articulate both architectural trajectories and cosmogenic expansion. In the ‘Cosmic’ drawings (2014–18), the artist explores the creation of light through the transformation of matter in space, as in the phenomena of quasars and supernovas. For Gormley, these drawings are ‘created by the forces of fluid matter and are discovered rather than made’.
Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007, the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2013. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year’s Honours list in 2014. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003.