Antony Gormley, R.A.

New Art Centre, Salisbury, where acquired by the Jerwood Foundation in March 2000

Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Belgium
Ragley Hall, Warwickshire

The piece has recently been inspected and cleaned by the artist's studio. The sculpture is in generally excellent condition, it has previously been exhibited outside and has naturally oxidized. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present lot.
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'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 is one of 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 recognise, and which constitutes a kind of third man, the Insider as alien witness...' (Gormley, ibid., pp.160-161).