Antony Gormley

White Cube, London
Private Collection, United States
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Richard Noble (ed.), Antony Gormley, London, 2007, n.n., illustrated in color p. 517

Cast iron with a lovely dark brown and silvered patina. There are some irregularities and some wear to the patina particularly to the chest and lower stomach. There is dirt in the crevices and a few small spots of patina loss to the feet of the figure. Otherwise this work is in good overall condition.
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Antony Gormley is an internationally-acclaimed sculptor and Turner Prize winner (1994) whose figure sculpture has attained an iconic status in British art. Often cast from his own body in iron or lead and exhibited in large-scale installations and public sites, Gormley’s sculptures investigate the relationship between the human body and space. As Richard Noble states, Gormley ‘is interested in the way the body experiences its own space, but also the way that experience in turn constitutes or influences the spaces (architectural, social, political) that give shape to our world’ (Richard Noble, ‘The Utopian Body’, Antony Gormley, Steidlmack, 2007, p. 48). 

By the late 1990s, when Construct II was created, the sculptor had reached a significant turning point in his career, culminating in his monumental The Angel of the North (1999). Embarking on large-scale projects in architectural and social spaces, Gormley situated his iconic figures in both natural and man-made environments — from the Northumbrian coast in Another Place to the centre of Cologne in Total Strangers (both 1997).

Construct II is part of a series of solid cast iron works initiated as a materialisation of the void space evident in the concrete geometrical blocks such as Flesh, Base and Sense from the early 1990s. In this work, the body is a sensor of its own condition, the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet are vertical planes pushing against virtual walls. The body as the site of life is tested against the room as the site of the body: implicating the viewer's presence in the process. The legs and chest of the work display prominent circular marks where the molten iron has been poured into the original mould, offering a fascinating insight into the construction of Gormley’s sculpture.

Suspended a few centimetres above the ground, Gormley’s figure is at once a restful and unsettled body, illustrating what he describes as the ‘illusion that we have of fixedness within the phenomenal world where in fact nothing is fixed’ (PressPlay: Contemporary Artists in Conversation, Phaidon, 2005, p. 24). In ‘mediating the two forces, gravity and centrifuge’, Gormley states, ‘the body case becomes an instrument through which these forces are made palpable’ (ibid., p. 24). The figure and its surroundings are strongly animated by the balancing of these forces – the hands are shown pushing out whilst the body appears to be falling through space. Drawing the viewer into a space that it inhabits, transforms and transfigures in intriguing ways, Construct II captures the very essence of Gormley’s complex artistic philosophy.