Towards the end of the 1990s, Antony Gormley embarked on an “experimentation into a reduction or concentration of the body”, combing a programmatic process of making with a studied, emotional intensity in his celebrated Insiders series (Antony Gormley quoted in: John Hutchingson, et al., Antony Gormley, London 2002, p. 160). The present work, Insider IV, is an archaic, skeletal figure rendered in cast iron. The Insiders sought to distil a trace of the body, an emotional concentrate, and to present this in sculptural form. “What is an Insider?”, Gormley writes:
“an Insider is to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is a core rather than a skeleton. It is a way of allowing things that are internal to the body - attitudes and emotions embedded in posture or hidden by gesture - to become revealed. They are equally alien and intimate.”
Insider IV amasses to one-third of the artist’s own body, chiselled back to its core. Executed in 1998, its making followed a set of rules that defines the series, whereby Gormley reduced a cast of his body laterally by two-thirds while retaining the height. The series reverses the expansion of the body that concerned the artist’s practice in the late 1980s and 90s, and instead turns inwards, finding a new form by penetrating deeper within the body. While the artist described the Expansion works as expressing the “biggest expanded breath”, the Insiders are a “final inhalation” (Antony Gormley quoted in: Martin Caiger-Smith, Antony Gormley, New York 2017, p. 252). As the boundaries of the body dissolve and contract, Martin Caiger-Smith notes that:
“the Insiders’ vulnerable forms had something of the look of the spindly marron figures found in early Egyptian rock art in the Sahara.”
Alberto Giacometti’s elongated bronze figures also form a compelling comparison, recalling a particular psychological intensity. Yet Gormley’s process of sculpting is the inverse of Giacometti’s, a stripping away and contraction of material as opposed to the Swiss artist’s gradual accumulation of clay and plaster. The present work is cast in iron, a dense, elemental metal that implies a relative permanence. The artist notes, “the earth has iron at its core, and these are like the cooled and revealed magnetic load cores of the body” (Antony Gormley quoted in: John Hutchingson, et al., Ibid.).
