Antony Gormley Presents 'BODY FIELD' at Xavier Hufkens
On view in Brussels until December 17.
Acclaimed British sculptor Sir Antony Mark David Gormley OBE has unveiled a new solo exhibition at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels. Housed at the gallery’s recently renovated St-Georges space, BODY FIELD presents a suite of new work that invite audiences to bring their bodies into a field of “sculpture as an instrument for awareness”.
Since the 1960s, Gormley has investigated the relationship between the body to space, by in some instances, using his own body as a blueprint to create minimal sculptures that probe questions pertaining to human emotion and its correlation to nature.
Deceptively minimal, each of his sculptures, such as PRESS (2021), NEST (2021) and CORNER (2022), provide visual building blocks that the audience is encouraged to metaphysically piece together using their own bodily presence and unique set of experiences. In the latter artwork, which Gormley has described as a concrete “bunker for one”, the artist created the sculpture by scanning his own body as he crouched in an isolated corner — which denotes “a human space in space at large,” according to a release by the gallery.
As visitors peruse the space, they will notice drawings that Gormley has placed throughout that provide interpretational clues to the sculptures on view. One of his newer studies, Double Blockworks, is made using a scan of the artist grasping one his previous works — an acknowledgement of his relationship to the very practice of art-making and the tools in which one uses to create, along with reflecting the biological process of mitosis, or the division and replication of genetically identical cells, which ensures the continuation of life.
In a statement, Gormley described this double-figured sculpture as a “matter as a continual dance of possibility between emergence and entropy, the acknowledgement of instability and inevitable jeopardy, but, at the same time, connection, the need to stand and to hold—to touch the world, the future, another body.”
The exhibition opened today and will be on view at Xavier Hufkens until December 17.
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Xavier Hufkens
Rue Saint-Georges 6
1050 Ixelles, Belgium
