This exhibition, Body Politic by Antony Gormley, was held at White Cube Bermondsey, one of my favourite London galleries.
Upon entry you encounter Gormley’s core subject, the human body, abstracted to a collection of blocks. Each of these pieces has a small square opening. He calls it a mouth, a cavity to the interior space.
This opening to the interior of a body is something found throughout history and which he has explored in his career. In Room, his piece at the Beaumont Hotel in London, you can sleep inside his sculpture.
He says “The only place where we can find true freedom is within the infinite darkness of the body available to us once the body is still.”
Resting Place, the mass installation, has 244 bodies constructed from hand-made bricks, 20 to 24 per person and arranged evenly throughout the space.
Their geometric construction does remind one of buildings and architecture but I saw something more sombre:
corpses arranged in a variety of positions: curled up in fear, laid out,
sometimes with limbs piled up.
We bring our own concerns to any interpretation of art and successful work is able to encompass a variety of meanings. What’s important is that it connects to the viewer. Once a piece is made it takes on a life of its own, completely out of the artist’s control.
Other works in the show include this monumental sculpture, Stand
and smaller, human-sized metal sculptures of bodies leaning, lying and sitting. Small children were having fun imitating these poses when I visited.
Bind anchors the ribbon form of a human in five points of space, changing in density, a geometric ribbon, as you walked around it.
