Antony Gormley

White Cube Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

London, Hayward Gallery,Antony Gormley: Blind Light, 2007, p. 107, illustrated in colour
Vitoria-Gasteiz, Artium, Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporaneo, Between You and Me - Antony Gormley, 2009, p. 95, illustrated in colour

Martin Caiger-Smith, Antony Gormley, London 2010, p. 94, illustrated in colour

The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the illustration fails to convey fully the three dimensional and sculptural quality of the work. This work is in very good condition.
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"Not being sure which way is up hopefully puts the viewer into freefall and loosens the boundaries of certainty [...] making the viewer more uncertain about his or her position in space and gravitational value"
The artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, The Hayward,Antony Gormley: Blind Light, 2007, p. 51

"The classical position of sculpture as an absolute object placed in space has been replaced by constructing a provisional energy field in space."
The artist interviewed by Pierre Tillet at antonygormley.com, from: Exhibition Catalogue, Rotterdam, Kunsthal, Antony Gormley: Between You and Me, 2008, p. 59

A highlight of the major retrospective exhibitionAntony Gormley: Blind Light  held at The Hayward, London in 2007, Freefall is the most important hanging sculpture by the artist to appear at auction. A complex geometrical matrix almost three metres across and comprised of countless very small square section steel bars, this is an outstanding example of Gormley's suspended space-frame forms and the first of its kind to be offered for public sale. At the centre of the three-dimensional linear structure resides a body-shaped void demarcated by an open network of polygons, which cascades through space and plummets towards earth in freefall. The relative spatial dimensions between the angular elements of the structure continually adjust as we move around it, thereby setting a kinetic dynamism of apparent movement against the fixed stasis of the trapped figure-void.

Gormley's output, which has also been celebrated in retrospective exhibitions from the Tate in Liverpool to the Malmö Konsthall in Sweden to the Irish Museum of Modern Art and additionally earned him the 1994 Turner Prize, has "revitalised the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation" (Exhibition Catalogue, London, The Hayward, Antony Gormley: Blind Light, 2007, jacket). Describing a body falling through space, the present sculpture physically embodies the artist's mission statement for so much of his sculptural language: "Not being sure which way is up hopefully puts the viewer into freefall and loosens the boundaries of certainty [...] making the viewer more uncertain about his or her position in space and gravitational value. Mass, weight and light are as important as scale for me" (the artist in: Antony Gormley: Blind Light, Op Cit, p. 51).

Indeed, Freefall exemplifies much of Gormley's best work, including the idea of the human body as place rather than object; the relationship between mass and space; and concepts of mutable forms and changing physical identities. His art is informed by a profound understanding of Eastern and Western spiritualities, and Freefall manifests his investigation into the relationship between the physical body and the realm of consciousness. He has declared "I want to confront existence...I turn to the body in an attempt to find a language that will transcend the limitations of race, creed and language, but which will still be about the rootedness of identity" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Liverpool, Tate, Antony Gormley, 1993, p. 49). The concept of the figure being permanently fixed within an immovable cage also evokes the artist's personal experience of suffering acute claustrophobia as a child, which he taught himself to conquer: "I started training myself by going backwards in my bed, forcing myself between quite tightly hospital-cornered bedclothes in the dormitory and lying with my feet on the pillow and my head down the bottom and saying to myself I must not panic" (the artist cited in: Lynn Barber, 'Body of work', The Observer, Sunday 9 March 2008).

In sculpting form and space Gormley is fascinated by geometry and various polygonal schemas. His organisation of mass and void parallels features of the bubble-matrix and the Weaire-Phelan structure (complex three dimensional arrangements in which space is partitioned into equal cells with the least surface area between them). The conception of Freefall originated with a plaster mould cast from the artist's body being covered in a metallic tessellation of various polygons - pentagons, hexagons and heptagons - welded together. This porous metallic skin complete, the plaster was removed to leave the figure-void residing perfectly inside, and a monumental architecture of straight steel rods attached to the junctions of the polygonal web. The outer ends of these emanating metal rays have been joined together to indicate the outer limits of the interior figure's potential movement.

Through this strategic approach to depict the body falling through space Gormley achieves what Richard Noble describes as "a place in which mass has been released from its stable, condensed form into a field of energy" (Richard Noble, 'The Utopian Body', Antony Gormley, Göttingen 2007, p. 45). With Freefall Gormley epitomises not only the dematerialization of physical form, but also the idea of presence through absence and the conceptual deconstruction of space itself. Asked by Pierre Tillet "is the idea of the missing body the main issue of Freefall?" the artist has explained that this sculpture advances the dialectic of mass and space beyond what has traditionally been either inversion (turning the body into space) or concentration (turning the body into solid mass) (the artist interviewed by Pierre Tillet at antonygormley.com, from: Exhibition Catalogue, Rotterdam, Kunsthal, Antony Gormley: Between You and Me, 2008, pp. 58-9). According to the artist, the relationship between mass and space in Freefall corresponds to the behaviour of atomic energy and matter in quantum mechanics. Furthermore, this sculpture has been inspired by the theories of quantum physicists such as David Bohm, and the Nobel prize-winning Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and the search for a Quantum Theory of Gravity that "applies the functions of a changing energy field to the mutability and interdependence of mind and matter" (Ibid). Ultimately this extraordinary work Freefall revolutionizes preconceptions about the nature of mass and void, giving physical form to the artist's explanation that here "the classical position of sculpture as an absolute object placed in space has been replaced by constructing a provisional energy field in space" (Ibid).