Antony Gormley — for the time being — Thaddaeus Ropac Marais Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 30 → June 4, 2011

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac announce for the time being, an exhibition of Antony Gormley’s works that includes a selection of Memes, his latest experiment in minimised abstract bodies.

for the time being uses strategies of scale, mass and three-dimensional drawing to create an experiential field in which the viewer’s own passage through the space is tested and informed by a variety of sculptural foils. Using principles that derive either from Euclidean geometry or crystal-formation, Gormley applies a series of abstract rules to represent the body, both as a space and a thing.

Installed in the gallery entrance, Clutch V, the largest and heaviest of the exhibited works (over 4 tonnes), immediately engages the viewer’s perception of scale. Two times life-size and eight times its volume, this work introduces an experiential field of objects that stimulate the proprioceptive powers of the viewer. In the downstairs gallery, Clutch VI is a reduction of the same geometry, but presented as a concentrated space-frame. In the upstairs gallery scale is again radically reconsidered through twelve 38 centimetre high Memes. Relating directly to the architecture of the gallery space, the Memes embody a diversity of mental states through a range of body postures.

Three polyhedral works — Cumulate, Fuse and Abstract: standing, lying and crouching in massive and linear form — continue to play with notions of solidity and impermanence certainty and uncertainty. This tension is most apparent in Fuse, an aggregation of crystal-like forms that make up a prone body, and in Drift, an abstracted cloud made up clustered wire polyhedrons. Other pieces like Construct or State, built on the constructional principles of architecture, re-describe body space in a system of interlocking frames or solid rectangular masses. The most extreme work in the exhibition, Forecast is a 4.5 metre high sculpture in which these solid rectilinear volumes have been extended in all three axes, turning our subjective spatial experience — front, right, left and down — into objective form.

The exhibition reveals Gormley’s understanding of his work as diagnostic instruments to investigate being in the world; interrogating both our bodies and how we relate to space through them.

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950 and received a degree from Trinity College, Cambridge in archaeology, anthropology and history of art. Upon completing his undergraduate studies, he travelled for three years in India before returning to enrol in Londonʼs Central College of Art, Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art. Gormleyʼs works have been the subject of group and solo exhibitions in numerous international museums and galleries as well as international art festivals such as the Venice Biennale and Kassel Documenta 8. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, was made an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1997 and has been a Royal Academician since 2003 and a British Museum Trustee since 2007.

A bilingual (English/French) catalogue with a text by Pierre Tillet will be published to accompany the exhibition.