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Antony Gormley, R.A.
Description
- Antony Gormley, R.A.
- Insider 53
aniline dye, shellac, polyurethane varnish on paper
- 76 by 57cm.; 30 by 22½in.
- Executed in 1999.
Provenance
Condition
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."
Catalogue Note
'What is an Insider? 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'.
Antony Gormley, quoted in John Hutchison et al., Antony Gormley, Phaidon, London, 2000, p.160
The present work stems from a series of sculptures entitled Insiders which occupied the artist from 1996 - 1999. The works began as an experiment with the reduction of form and the sixteen sculptures in the series were all two thirds reductions of the artist's own body as well as three works based on different women and one based on the artist's first child. As Gormley explained, 'the idea is that the pieces carry in concentrated form the trace of the body and its passage through life...The Insider suggests also that the most intimate is the most strange, that inside each of us is a self that we would maybe rather not recognize, and which constitutes a kind of third man, the Insider as alien witness...' (Gormley, ibid., pp.160-161).