GRIP II is part of Antony Gormley’s ongoing BLOCKWORK series that makes physical pixelisations with a rising canon of four blocks, each eight times the volume of the one before, keeping the same 1:1:2 proportion. In applying the rules of architecture and its absolute geometries, using an objective register of a particular human life, the work’s improvised construction is intended to evoke an internal state. The edge is very important: light and space eat into the embodied core, so it has a quality of incomplete resolution. For the artist, the success of it depends on there being an absolute tension between the sharp material clarity of the steel blocks, and a sense of vulnerability and exposure in the gestalt. The opposing principles that underpin so much of Gormley’s sculpture – mass and void, earth and space, the darkness of the body and light – are held in dynamic tension here. In discussing GRIP II and other works in this series, Gormley states: “I think we have to stick with this urban condition because this is the condition; this is the crucible in which the contemporary imagination has to produce its fruits. There are only two subjects which interest me: body and space, or experience and extension. The human condition can only be addressed through issues of architecture and the body” (A. Gormley cited in: Exh. Cat., Monterrey, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Antony Gormley, 2008, p. 83).