Antony Gormley, “MEET”
Stockholm, 21.8–4.10 2014
Galleri Andersson/Sandström Stockholm is proud to open our fall season 2014 with one of its most extensive exhibitions to date – a solo exhibition by one of today’s most influential sculptors, the British artist Antony Gormley. Entitled MEET, the exhibition turns the gallery’s architecture into a psychic and physiological testing ground. Gormley will present twelve new, previously unseen works that all explore the relationship between the human body and the space surrounding it.
In a career spanning nearly 40 years, Antony Gormley (b. 1950) has developed the potential opened up by sculpture in the 1970s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human being stands in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.
MEET is based on an architectural language where the cube functions as the basic element. Dispersed tactically throughout the gallery spaces as a series of alternating singular and paired interventions, the sculptures invite circumnavigation and are catalysts for a choreography of movement.
The most comprehensive work in the exhibition is MATRIX, a site-specific sculpture made from black 6mm steel bar on a 200mm grid re-enforcing bar. The scale is defined by the dimensions of the room. At its centre is a body-scaled void, 180 x 60 x 40 cm, created by the eleven interwoven volumes that colonise each other’s space. The work uses a cross-hatching technique, a graphic device used to deal with space, light and shade, which is now used structurally to capture space itself. This creates an optical effect where foreground and background are constantly shifting and confusing our sense of orientation and stability in the room.
Listen to Antony Gormley and Karsten Thurfjell talk about MATRIX (from Kulturnytt, Sveriges Radio 140821)
In conjunction with the exhibition, Galleri Andersson/Sandström together with Antony Gormley’s Studio, has produced a catalogue featuring a substantial text by Professor Maaretta Jaukkuri, former Chief Curator at Kiasma in Helsinki. The book launch will be held at the same time as the opening.
Antony Gormley:
Born in London in 1950, Antony Gormley has had a number of solo shows at venues including the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Hayward Gallery, London; Kunsthalle zu Kiel; Malmö Konsthall; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen. Major public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England) and Exposure (Lelystad, The Netherlands). In Sweden, public works by Gormley can be visited in Umeå, Stockholm and Wanås. He has also participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale and the Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany. 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. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and since 2007 a British Museum Trustee.
Galleri Andersson/Sandström has collaborated with Antony Gormley since 1994 and MEET is his second solo exhibition with the gallery. Gormley has participated in group shows at Umedalen Sculpture Park at five different occasions: 1994, 1998, 2002, 2004, 2008.