Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Antony Gormley is the man who dared to transform our bodies into architecture and our cities into existential theaters. For over forty years, this British sculptor born in 1950 has hammered a truth that contemporary art pretends to ignore: we are spatial creatures, condemned to inhabit space as much as to be inhabited by it. Faced with his armies of cast iron that populate our beaches, roofs, and museums, one cannot remain indifferent. Gormley does not offer us art objects, but phenomenological experiences that question our relationship to the world with an urgency that few contemporary artists can match.
Gormley’s work rises against the dictatorship of the gaze dominating our hyper-visualized era. His sculptures do not merely want to be seen; they demand to be lived. When he declares [1]: “Our appearance belongs to others, we live in the darkness of the body,” he lays the foundations of an aesthetic of interiority that subverts all our codes. These words resonate with a disturbing depth in a society where the image reigns as the absolute master. The sculptor reminds us that our true experience of the world is born in this “darkness of the body” that we all share, this camera obscura of consciousness where our common humanity is forged.
Architecture as a metaphor for the body: The poetics of inhabited spaces
Gormley’s exploration finds its deepest roots in an architectural conception of the human body that revolutionizes our understanding of contemporary sculpture. This vision fully blooms in his “Blockworks” series, initiated in the early 2000s, where traditional anatomy gives way to architectural volumes that transform the body into a building. These works do not merely represent bodies; they constitute true bodily architectures that question our relationship to built space. The artist develops what he himself calls the dialectic between the “first body” (our biological envelope) and the “second body” (our built environment), establishing a troubling continuity between flesh and concrete, skin and façade.
This architectural approach finds its most spectacular manifestation in works like “Model” (2012), a construction of one hundred tons of steel allowing visitors to enter a body transformed into a building. The experience then literally becomes one of inhabiting another, of roaming his internal spaces as one strolls through the corridors of a building. This dizzying inversion, where the body becomes architecture and architecture becomes body, reveals Gormley’s brilliant intuition: we do not simply live in buildings; we ourselves are spatial constructions. His “Blockworks” push this logic to its most radical consequences, replacing the organic curve with the architectural angle, substituting the sensuality of flesh with the geometric austerity of construction.
The intelligence of this approach reveals itself in its ability to make the viewer a temporary inhabitant of these body-buildings. When Gormley installs “Critical Mass II” in different contexts, from the Viennese tram station to the Rodin Museum in Paris, he demonstrates how architecture influences our perception of the bodies it houses. These sixty cast-iron figures, arranged around twelve fundamental positions of the human body, transform each exhibition space into a metaphysical city where the relationships between individual and collective, between solitude and community, are negotiated. Architecture ceases to be a simple container to become an actor in sculptural dramaturgy.
This architectural poetics also reveals a political dimension often overlooked in the work. By transforming the body into a building, Gormley questions our contemporary modes of habitation and probes the rampant urbanization that defines our era. His installations such as “Time Horizon” at Houghton Hall reveal how our bodies inscribe themselves into the architectural landscape, how they embrace its rhythms and constraints. The artist does not merely place sculptures in space; he reveals space as the sculptor of our identities. This approach finds its most accomplished theoretical formulation in his collaborations with architects, notably during his interventions in historical sites where his metal bodies dialog with ancient stones.
The recent work “Body Buildings,” presented in Beijing at the end of this year, pushes this reflection toward new conceptual territories. Using fired clay and iron, fundamental construction materials, Gormley explores what he calls “thinking and feeling the body in this condition.” The exhibition questions our relationship to the built environment in an increasingly vertical world, questioning our humanity in megalopolises that seem to surpass us. Each figure then becomes a “physical pixel” in the artist’s words, an elemental unit of a humanity pixelated by contemporary architecture.
This architectural vision of the body culminates in works like “Alert” (2022), a crouching body constructed in cantilever with corten steel slabs, which materializes the precariousness of our urban equilibria. Architecture is no longer a metaphor for the body here; it becomes the very language through which the body expresses its vulnerability in the contemporary built environment. Gormley thus reveals that we are all precarious architectures, bodily edifices subjected to the same laws of gravity and balance as our urban constructions. This poetics of architectural instability resonates with an era where our cities seem to defy both the laws of physics and those of human habitability.
The literary space of the body: A sculptural writing of silence
Gormley’s work maintains a relationship with literature that goes far beyond simple thematic inspiration: it constitutes a true sculptural writing that borrows from the art of words its deepest narrative strategies. This literary dimension flourishes first in the very conception of his installations as spatial narratives where each figure becomes a mute character in a silent dramaturgy. The artist develops what might be called a bodily grammar akin to the narrative structures of modern literature, where the unspoken prevails over the explicit, where silence becomes more eloquent than speech. This approach finds its roots in his training in archaeology and anthropology, disciplines that familiarized him with reading human traces as textual fragments to decipher.
The “Event Horizon” series, successively deployed in London, New York, São Paulo, and Hong Kong, perfectly illustrates this literary conception of sculptural space. These thirty-one figures perched on rooftops constitute a true urban novel where each silhouette tells a story of isolation and connection in the contemporary metropolis. Like Virginia Woolf’s characters in “Mrs Dalloway,” they simultaneously inhabit their individual solitude and participate in a collective narrative fabric encompassing the entire city. The artist transforms the urban horizon into a writing page where a poetry of distance and proximity, of the visible and the invisible, unfolds.
This literary dimension is also revealed in the way Gormley conceives sculptural time. His works do not represent frozen moments but narrative durations that unfold in the spectator’s experience. The “Another Place” installation on Crosby beach functions like a novel flowing where one hundred cast iron figures undergo the tides in a cyclical temporality evoking great literary sagas. Each figure carries within it the history of its metamorphoses, barnacles, lichens, and erosion, constituting a living archive comparable to the temporal layers deployed in the novels of Claude Simon or W.G. Sebald. The artist thus reveals that sculpture can carry a narrative memory as complex as that of literary works.
Gormley’s conception of sculptural silence directly borrows from the narrative strategies of modern literature. Just as Samuel Beckett transforms silences into dramatic material in his plays, Gormley makes the muteness of his figures a form of unprecedented sculptural eloquence. His metal bodies do not speak but tell, through their simple spatial presence, stories of waiting, endurance, resistance against the erosion of time. This poetics of silence finds its most radical formulation in works like “Still Standing,” where immobility becomes a narrative act revealing the epic dimension of simple persistence in existence.
The artist also develops a topographical conception of narration akin to the innovations of contemporary literature. His installations function as narrative maps where the spectator becomes an explorer of a sculptural territory laden with potential stories. “Asian Field,” with its two hundred thousand clay figurines, thus constitutes a true spatial library where each tiny form carries its share of humanity, creating a collective narrative that evokes the novelistic frescoes of Roberto Bolaño or Don DeLillo. The artist reveals that space can carry narratives as dense and complex as those of literature.
This literary dimension finally expresses itself in the way Gormley conceives the reading of his works. Like a literary text, each installation demands a temporality of discovery that transforms the spectator into a spatial reader. The work “Resting Place,” with its two hundred forty-four terracotta figures arranged on the ground, invites a wandering akin to reading an epic poem where each stanza reveals new harmonics of meaning. The artist thus transforms the exhibition space into a reading space, revealing that contemporary sculpture can develop narrative strategies as sophisticated as those of avant-garde literature. This literary conception of sculpture ultimately reveals that Gormley does not merely sculpt forms; he writes with space an unprecedented bodily poetry that renews both sculptural art and our understanding of what a narrative can be in contemporary art.
The revelation of inner space
What strikes about Gormley is his ability to materialize the immaterial, to give shape to this universal experience of inner life that we all carry. His works like “Blind Light” (2007) or “Cave” (2019) do not merely represent spaces; they create experiential conditions that reveal the infinite space existing within us. This approach radically transforms the traditional relationship between sculptor and spectator. Here, there is no distant contemplation: the artwork demands immersion, it insists that we physically enter it to grasp its meaning.
Gormleys intelligence lies in his intuitive understanding that our era suffers from a crisis of inner space. Overwhelmed by information flows, crushed by the acceleration of social time, we have lost contact with this contemplative dimension that his sculptures reveal with a particular urgency. When he asserts “I question the notion that the retinal response is the only communication channel in art,” he formulates a revolutionary aesthetic program that places the body back at the center of the artistic experience.
Yet, this work is not without troubling questions. The systematic use of his own body as a sculptural matrix raises questions: what universality can a white British man, trained at Cambridge and coming from pharmaceutical bourgeoisie, claim? This critique, regularly addressed to the artist, reveals the tensions of contemporary art regarding identity issues. But reducing Gormleys work to this biographical dimension would overlook his fundamental intuition: the experience of embodiment transcends social and cultural categories.
Gormleys bodies are never portraits but archetypes, empty forms ready to receive the projection of those who encounter them. This universalizing quality of his work, far from being a weakness, perhaps constitutes its main strength in a world fragmented by identity particularities. His sculptures offer a common territory, a shared language of embodied humanity that resists contemporary divisions.
Gormleys public art reveals a political ambition often underestimated. “The Angel of the North,” with its twenty meters in height and fifty-four meters in wingspan, does not merely mark the landscape: this work transforms the relationship of the inhabitants of northern England to their territory. It offers a new collective narrative to a region marked by deindustrialization, proposing a contemporary mythology that reconciles a working-class past and a post-industrial future.
This political dimension is also expressed in works like “One & Other” (2009), where Trafalgar Square becomes for a hundred days the stage of an unprecedented democratic performance. By inviting two thousand four hundred volunteers to successively occupy the fourth plinth of the square, Gormley transforms public art into a citizen experience. The work reveals that contemporary sculpture can renew forms of democratic participation, offering new spaces of representation in a society in search of places for collective expression.
Contemporary materiality
The evolution of materials in Gormleys work tells the story of our contemporary transformations. From the lead of the early works to the corten steel of the latest creations, passing through cast iron and aluminum, each material carries its symbolic and technical charge. This attention to materiality reveals a sculptor deeply anchored in his era, aware that contemporary industrial materials express our condition as much as marbles expressed that of Antiquity.
His latest works, constructed in terracotta and organized according to modular logics, reveal a new attention to ecological issues and the crisis of contemporary housing. “Resting Place” (2023) transforms the gallery into a metaphorical refugee camp where two hundred and forty-four figures seek their place in a world in permanent migration. The artist thus reveals that sculpture can carry a sociological diagnosis as precise as that of contemporary sociology.
Gormley’s work ultimately constitutes a necessary antidote to contemporary acceleration. In a world that favors speed over depth, surface over interiority, connection over contemplation, his sculptures impose a different tempo. They demand time, require slowness, and reveal that true art can only be born through duration and patience. This sculptural temporality becomes an act of resistance against the permanent urgency of our era.
Facing Gormley’s sculptures, we rediscover this fundamental experience of art: the encounter with otherness. His metal figures reflect our own image while revealing our constitutive strangeness. They materialize the troubling intuition that we are strangers to ourselves, mysterious bodily architectures inhabited by an infinite space that we endlessly explore. In this, Gormley does not only offer us sculptures but instruments of self-knowledge of a rare effectiveness in contemporary art.
- Antony Gormley, cited in numerous interviews and exhibition catalogs, notably in “BBC Forum Questions And Answers”, 2002.
