Antony Gormley, In Habit @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

 

Antony Gormley, Installation @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, June 2020

Antony Gormley's sculptures are about so much more than the material and objects themselves. His recent exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac, In Habit, fills the downstairs space of the gallery with steel. As the title suggests, steel is both habitually running through the gallery spaces and creating a habitation. The title is both a noun and a verb as well as gesturing towards an adjective. Notions of living, home, the built environment, the world we occupy become merged with feelings of entrapment and being stuck, lost, in the sway of something outside of ourselves, something that we cannot control because we are slave to a habit. Or the behavior might be a benign kind of habitual, regular occurrence. Like steel, the body and the object one and the same thing.

In the principle downstairs space, Run II (2019) is like a living, breathing organism, running across doorways, from room to room. As it moves up stairs and around the gallery, I was reminded of a science fiction creature, creeping through a foreign world to which it doesn't belong. And yet, steel is the scaffolding of our world. 

Antony Gormley, Float, 2019

Gormley's use of steel makes the material confounding. I might be reminded of a creature slithering across the floor and around the walls, but the works are made of steel, of an intransigent metal. The works are also about line, the graphic line of the pencil as it moves across a page, the line of a steel infrastructure. The rusted line becomes like a thread, turning at right angles, impossibly. In Gormley's hands, steel reminds of drawings, the movement of our bodies in space, as well as those of an alien organism. Other works such as Float represent the body at rest, in a pose. But then when we look at them from certain angles, we see that the head is raised, uncomfortably held up at the neck, struggling to hold the pose. 

Antony Gormley, Head, 2019

The tension between the organic and the industrial material is always the contradiction at the heart of Gormley's sculptures. In the upstairs galleries, Nest, Float and Head (all 2019) are rusted. These works have no movement, no flexibility, in them at all, and indeed, the figures remind us of bodies holding yoga poses. And yet, they are inflexible, unlike the yogi. Of course, they are also contradictory: they are lines without beginning and end, entwined channels of rust. Run has a beginning and end, even if it is moving into spaces that it doesn't belong. Rust is about politics and capitalism, rust is about the world that we live in. 

Antony Gormley, Run 2, 2019

Like all of Gormley's work, these sculptures play on confusion, not only between the organic and the industrial. They are involved in a process of erasing the distinguishing line between inside and outside. When we stand in relation to Run II, are we inside the matrix or out? And do we see the innards of bodies made of steel, or we looking at figures protected by the skin of rust?