Antony Gormley KUB 09.03

Antony Gormley
Event Horizon | 2007
27 Fiberglas- und
4 Gusseisenfiguren,
je 189 × 53 × 29 cm
Installationsansicht,
Hayward Gallery, London
Fotografie: Richard Bryant
Since the early 1980s the artist has been developing works in which
he has reflected upon the phenomenology of spatial experience
and the limits of the empirical horizon beyond the physical boundaries
of the body. In the Domain series, for example, the interior
sensations of the subject’s body-space are evoked from a welded
matrix constructed from lengths of stainless steel bar. In the Feeling
Material series the energy field surrounding a body-space is
generated by a continuous unbroken line. These experiments are
linked to Clearing V (2009), which is presented on the second floor
of KUB: an endless metal line that describes its own tensile capabilities
while springing twelve kilometers of raw aluminum tubing
from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. Gormley’s intention here is to
create a three-dimensional drawing in space: “I am trying to
destroy the fixed coordinates of a room and make a space/time
continuum that is both a thing and a drawing.” The complex field of
spirals and sine waves takes on its own autonomously formal character,
determined by both the framework of the architecture and the
inherent qualities of the material. Here, as in all the installations, the
viewer is an integral part of the work, becoming the subject of a
constantly renegotiated visual field.
On the third floor Gormley presents Critical Mass II (cast iron,
1995, commissioned for the StadtRaum Remise, Vienna); an installation
of sixty figures cast from moulds taken of his body – squatting,
sitting, kneeling or bowed in mourning – which develop from a low
crouching position and ascend to an upright standing position with
the head tilted upward: a syntax of twelve body-postures that are here
muddled and tumbled. Some works are suspended, most are earth-
12 13 KUB-Programm 09.03 Antony Gormley