Antony Gormley: Umwelt | Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg

This exhibition brings together my most recent attempts to reconcile the first and the second body; if the first body, our material, biological body, is our first dwelling, then the second is our built environment, which we have become part of and largely dependent upon. These works attempt to map and materialise the interactions between these two bodies.—Antony Gormley

Conceived for Villa Kast and responding to the context of this former family home, the exhibition #Umwelt comprises sculptures from Antony Gormley’s recent investigations in living space where the body is seen as a place rather than an object. As the title
indicates, the works on view explore in drawing and sculpture the dynamics between the internal condition of the human body and its environment (‘Umwelt’), testing its boundaries and permeability.
‘On one level, the human body can be understood as a closed system,’ states the artist, ‘but on another level, it is open to all the variables of its context. The question of where our bodies end and surroundings begin is an open question and leads to open work.’

As this exhibition’s immediate context, Villa Kast has been useful to Gormley’s purpose: here is a nineteenth century house that has been abstracted and, since 1989, transformed into a space for art.
The surrounding architecture still bares faint traces of its familial past. The villa’s rooms are now uncannily re-inhabited by Gormley’s sculptures, which activate the house and allow it to become a zone for reflexive thinking and feeling. While mapping the human body, the works on display simultaneously highlight the symbiotic relationship between bodies and their surrounding environments.

This exhibition presents for the first time a group of ‘Extended Strapworks’ that Gormley has developed over the last two and a half years. Linear and open, these sculptures comprise two or four circuits of rusted ribbon steel in the form of Möbius strips that
pass around the space surrounding a single body.
Sculptures such as Dwell (2022) and Implicate III (2022) break the body-boundary and reach out towards the edges of the spaces they inhabit, recognising how a room’s orthogonality affects our internal perception of space. Seen through the villa’s many doorways and apertures, the sculptures seem to extend out infinitely, stretching beyond the confines of the rooms. For the artist, the lack of a definable body-boundary poses the question of ‘where the body begins and ends and to what extent we, having made the world, are then made by it.’ In the exhibition, Gormley has also included earlier works, such as two ‘Blockworks’ downstairs and an ‘Open Blockwork’ in the library upstairs, to share the origin of the ‘Extended Strapworks’’ orthogonality.

While the sculptures on the ground floor focus on individual bodies in space, the exhibition continues upstairs with two ‘double’ works that explore human connections within shared environments and which show one body osmosing into another. The artist
explains that Circuit (2022) and Tangle (2022) are ‘a realisation of lockdown; when you’re not always in a rush, suddenly you become aware that the #people you live with are also part of your dwelling. These works are about closeness and what it means to share. How, in other words, we are social beings defined by our intimate relations.’ Here is the promise of bodies in space that is carried on into bodies as space.

Outside, behind the villa and facing the Mirabell Gardens, is Run (2016). This large-scale work materialises the volume of a small room in a single, endless, massive cast line. Mapping the space of a human habitat, Run delineates but also confuses the
surfaces and apertures of our built world by making them porous. If the works inside the villa test the bounding condition of the ‘first body’ as well as the confines of the ‘second body’, then Run challenges the viewer to consider how architecture both
encourages and enforces certain forms of bodily choreography.

Carefully positioned throughout #Umwelt are a number of Gormley’s drawings. Fold IV (2018) invokes the body as a field of dispersed energy seen against a grid, whilst Systole/Diastole XII (2008) meditates on ‘one and twoness’. Drawn with burins in the artist’s hands and utilising the full sweep of his arms, Systole/Diastole XII describes a moment of registered being, a kind of choreography for the hand-arm-brain. The most recent drawings in the exhibition are made with deliquescing inkcap mushrooms and show bodies caught as if in a web. As the writer and art historian Rye Dag Holmboe has written in the catalogue that will accompany the exhibition, the inkcap drawings ‘can be seen as attempts to modify the relationship between the human and its environment-world. To draw with mushroom is not to master nature but to collaborate with it. It is to acknowledge our
implication in an unseen world, to recognise that we form part of life when often we feel that we stand apart from it, or above it.’

In questioning the fundamental spaces of human habitation, both bodily and environmental, the exhibition addresses conditions of vulnerability and our instinctive desire for protection: ‘I use sculpture to re-examine, for myself, what it means to inhabit this bit of matter that is the body, hoping that this might be of use to others. I want to use the instrumental potential of sculpture through which you might sense an extended field of perception.’

Further information in the press release to download