Antony Gormley

Private Collection, Australia

Melbourne, Anna Schwartz Gallery, MEMES, 17th March - 23rd April 2011, un-numbered exhibition.

Structurally sound, the work appears in excellent overall condition. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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We are grateful to the Artist's studio for their kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

Standing more than twenty meters tall near the A1 in Gateshead, Antony Gormley’s iconic ANGEL OF THE NORTH is one of the most important and recognised public commissions of the past century. Executed in 1998, it embodies the concern with size and scale that has been of central importance to Gormley throughout his career. At just shy of 8cm. tall, MEME CLIII, is as small as the Angel is large but is every bit as captivating, retaining the artist’s characteristic use of the formal language of architecture within the renderings of the human form. The work is from a series of the artist’s most diminutive of sculptures begun in 2007, the MEMEs. These are small, solid iron works  which use the formal language of architecture to replace anatomy. The resulting volumes articulate a range of body postures with each of the 33 individual works in the series made up of 27 identical iron blocks, positioned in a unique way to form the figure and create a different pose, displaying recognisable human emotional states.

 

The title of the series is taken from Richard Dawkins’ theory, in which he coined the term ‘memes’ on the basis of genes, and used the term to describe the dissemination of cultural ideas and beliefs that are transmitted in thought or behaviour from one body to another, each responding to conditional environments, self-replicating and capable of mutation. The complete series of MEMEs was first shown at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia in 2011. Placed directly on the floor and widely spaced the lexicon of body postures and possible expressions displayed in Gormley’s MEMEs invited the viewer to become conscious, through the disparity of scale, of his or her own physical and emotional relationship to the work. The MEMEs display a multitude of possibilities both through their individual formation and their positioning within a group or family: when grouped together there is a sense of their communication and dialogue with each other and when viewed separately they come to represent an atomised society, one which the viewer is looking down on, standing as a godly figure.

 

Gormley’s MEMEs make us question what a shift in the position of the blocks might represent, how small re-figurations of form can elicit strong emotional responses from the viewer to a small, made object and how we come to recognise varying physical states as they stand tall or cower from some unseen terror. The artist invites us to view them, both as individuals and figures in relation to their surroundings, all the while enjoying the very human personalities that they come to embody.