Antony Gormley’s LIFT 2 (MEME) IV belongs to his renowned series of small solid iron works, ‘Memes’, which use the formal language of architecture to create forms that call on the body. The work’s stacked blocks articulate, investigate and re-describe the form of the human body, carrying “the invitation of empathy and the transmission of states of mind.”

Executed in 2018, LIFT 2 (MEME) IV forms part of this distinctive series, begun in 2009, which currently features 60 body postures. The title of the series borrows a term coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his pivotal book The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins defines the ‘meme’ (‘imitated thing’) as the cultural analogue of a gene and uses the term to describe the self-replicating and infinitely mutable dissemination of cultural ideas from one individual to another through behavioural acts, such as speech or gesture. Gormley draws on this principle in his ‘Memes’, creating sculptural units that propagate cultural information through a multitude of delicately rendered body postures and expressions. In this way, each ‘Meme’ is made from the same set of 19 blocks which are then skilfully re-positioned by the artist in order to render the dramatic effect of minor compositional shifts and their emotive potential for the viewer.

LIFT 2 (MEME) IV is an outstanding example of Gormley’s idiosyncratic sculptural practice; assembled in an intimate scale, it retains the artist’s characteristic fascination with the relationship between architecture and the human body. Here, anatomy is replaced by architectonic volumes and the viewer is asked to consciously consider the sculpture in relation to themselves, through the framework of their own physicality.