Antony Gormley
Second Body
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
69 Avenue du Général Leclerc, 93500 Pantin, France
March 1 – July 18, 2015

Now on view at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin, Second Body features new sculptural work by Antony Gormley. In a recent statement by the artist, Gormley describes an interest in “a psychological architecture that allows surface and mass, light and dark, open and closed volumes free play in works that become places for an adventure in real time.” The gallery space, having previously functioned as a foundry, is divided into a number of distinct spaces, which Gormley treats as such. The installation Expansion Field, occupying one of the gallery’s four distinct exhibition spaces, consists of sixty sculptures which take their shape from fundamental positions of the human body, each incrementally expanded from these essential forms. The largest work in the exhibition, Matrix II, is a virtual architecture: Gormley delineates sixteen room-sized spaces with re-enforcing mesh—a material typically used in the construction of concrete forms—around a central, empty space the approximate size of two standing bodies. An exploration of the human habitat, Matrix II reveals its inaccessible spaces to the viewer through the layers of mesh with further-disorienting effects.

A catalogue will be available in Spring 2015, featuring texts by American choreographer William Forsythe, art historian Guitemie Maldonado, and a conversation between Antony Gormley and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

SMALL STOP, 2013. Cast iron, 26.5 x 23 x 40 centimeters. Courtesy of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.