Antony Gormley is an English sculptor. He was born on 30 August 1950 in London. Alongside the French artist Laure Prouvost, Anish Kapoor and Damien Hirst, he is one of the recipients of the Turner Prize, awarded since 1984. His work explores the representation of the human body, its nature, and its relationship to the world. This exploration surprises us: it is an inquiry into the very nature of sculpture.

Interior and exterior, solid and void

Feeling Material XIV, 2005, 4 mm square‑section mild steel bar, 225 × 218 × 170 cm.
Antony Gormley, photograph by Stephen White, London.

Like this work Feeling Material XIV, Antony Gormley’s sculptures prompt questions: How far does the human body extend? Where are its limits? Are there even limits? Sculpture usually relies on an immediate, very strong characteristic of solid matter: its surface. This immediately and sharply clarify the limits of the human body in space. Outside lies air — and in this view, emptiness. Inside is solid matter, whatever its nature. For physicists, chemists and biologists, this surface is an interface that has virtually no thickness. One moves from solid to void over less than an atomic distance. This is true for all materials commonly used in sculpture: marble, metals, wood, wax, plaster… And also for the human body itself, here delineated in space by its skin.

Sculpture and the faithful reproduction of the forms of nature

Thus, whether carving marble or wood, or casting plaster, wax or metals, the challenge is to reproduce the forms of nature identically, notably to preserve presence across time. The result is impressive — even staggering. Let us consider an example.

Voltaire Nude by Jean‑Baptiste Pigalle
Photo RMN – Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski
https://images.grandpalaisrmn.fr/ark:/36255/01-018455

In 1770, Voltaire agreed to be represented by Jean‑Baptiste Pigalle as an almost naked old man. And one truly sees the body of an elderly man. This precision in reproducing the body’s surface as we perceive it has also made possible the depiction of a fascinating facial expression. With this strikingly life like statue, Voltaire is still with us. Seven hundred and thirty‑five kilogrammes of marble enabled this tour de force. This statue is, of course, solid: how else could marble be carved? But it could equally well be hollow and remain the same work, identical. That is not the issue. Only the outer surface counts — the surface that defines the form in all its details. More precisely, only the details that our vision is able to perceive… though our sight is very demanding.

Rodin: “Not only the form but life itself”
In the book Rodin, le livre du centenaire, the art historian Catherine Lampert, former director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, reports this anonymous quotation:
“My principle, said Rodin, is not merely to imitate form, but to imitate life. I seek this life in nature, but amplify it, exaggerating hollows and protrusions in order to give more light; then within the whole I seek a synthesis.”

L’Homme qui marche (The Walking Man) Auguste Rodin
RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
https://images.grandpalaisrmn.fr/ark:/36255/95-004333

Rodin’s The Walking Man manifests these hollows and protrusions that serve this desire to imitate life, to imitate its expressions. We see, on the one hand, how life seems to emerge from inert matter, and on the other, how far Rodin departs here from Jean‑Baptiste Pigalle’s project. There are no hollows and protrusions on Pigalle’s Voltaire other than those of aged
skin and tired muscles.

With Antony Gormley, we explore the extent of the living body
Antony Gormley exhibited at the Musée Rodin in 2023. Unfortunately, I did not see it — a
regret.
https://youtu.be/GU5qd7HHYW0?si=yNgM-IZq9dfC-FQ2
EXHIBITION | Antony Gormley – Critical Mass, interview with Antony Gormley

Paradoxically, it seems to me that the works shown in this video for that recent exhibition bring him close to Rodin’s concerns, even though his work Feeling Material XIV, shown above along with many others, appears to embody a radically different vision. I take this as a sign of the richness of Gormley’s practice. Still in Rodin, le livre du centenaire, Sophie Biass‑Fabiani,
a curator at the Musée Rodin, writes a text titled “Expressionism Today: Lineages and
Confrontations”. She notes of Antony Gormley:
“Antony Gormley, while restricting himself to the human form, shifts the subject of his work towards the relationship between the body’s space and the surrounding space.”

In my physicist’s language, after Jean‑Baptiste Pigalle and Rodin, we move here to a third model that underpins a new form of sculpture seen through the viewer’s eyes. Here, in order to present it in space, the artist returns to the very nature of a living body — its presence, its extension in space, as emphasised in the quotation above. The work no longer makes the distinction between void and solid, exterior and interior, so obvious. On the contrary, it questions them immediately through the choice of materials. It is practically impossible to create a compact mass using the metal wire employed by the artist. To obtain a compact metal structure, one generally passes through the liquid phase, which is by nature compact.

From the Musée Rodin website: “Two techniques allow the transition from the plaster model to bronze: lost‑wax casting and sand casting, used in Rodin’s time but very rare today. In both cases, molten bronze is poured into a mould around a core that is later removed. In the end, the bronze work is hollow, which reduces both its weight and its cost.”

Antony Gormley and the human body beyond the visible

In many of Antony Gormley’s works, the metal wires in Feeling Material XIV establish a human figure at the centre of the piece. It is obvious. Around it and further away, the same wires whirl. They set up a metaphor: that of a living body that cannot be limited to its physical envelope. A living body speaks, moves, travels, but also breathes, sweats, and constantly emits particles of multiple types and sizes — water vapour, even liquids, etc. Gormley’s works are not explicit; he does not point to any one of these aspects in particular. I can imagine a multitude of exchanges — of energy, of matter, of information — between a living body and the rest of the world, beyond the skin, the physical boundary of this material body, the only one considered by Jean‑Baptiste Pigalle. This work by Gormley must of course go beyond my physicist’s view; one must be able to imagine, through it, an infinite variety of other exchanges between a person and the rest of the world.

Antony Gormley, Iris van Herpen: a new human body in the world
In August 2024, I wrote an article for The Conversation entitled “Fashion: the dresses of Iris van Herpen, hybridisations of the female body with the world”. With Antony Gormley’s exhibition in Paris, which closed in March 2024, one can perceive a continuity in these post‑Covid years. For in my view, with her dresses extending well beyond the body, Iris van Herpen addresses the same questions: bodies in space, their interactions with one another and with the world. With Gormley’s works, through my physicist’s eyes, a world opens in which the sculpture of a body cannot be limited to its strict bodily envelope. And it is a vast world, full above all of questions and uncertainties.

A body continually renewed by technology — but is it still human?

https://scrapbox.io/artresearch/Antony_Gormley

Antony Gormley with works from his “Beamers” series. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/antony-gormley-interview-about-art-519437

In this image, Antony Gormley stands beside two of his sculptures. We find life‑size silhouettes, the same scale as the artist. I cannot believe they are robots — that would be too literal, too obvious. One would perceive suggestions of mechanisms, even material humanoid elements. And although the reference to the human remains strong, we remain in the realm of metaphor surrounding the body, not representation. Here, interior and exterior are no longer so evident, so interwoven are they. And if the body is materialised by a network of extremely dense, rigid metal bars, they enclose emptiness, and there is no solid mass occupying the whole space. A living human body consists of soft organs that bind and intertwine — organs with rounded, smooth shapes, compact, round or elongated, leaving no empty spaces. That is Gormley’s body on the left. The two statues on the right systematically negate this: straight vertical and horizontal lines only, right angles everywhere. Moreover, empty spaces defined by rigid steel emphasise the brutality of this structure. Bodies, then all alike, on the verge of being restructured by a technology that favours such obvious forms — the opposite of complexity, singularity, subtlety, finesse, or even the suppleness suggested, despite age, by Pigalle’s Voltaire. As a physicist of rigid solids who works in proximity with the physics of soft matter — the physics of the living — I feel here a kind of kinship. This is how I receive these works and this second metaphor. Ever less human…

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Art, Creativity, Sculpture