Antony Gormley

White Cube, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2000

James Hall, Follow Me: Britische Kunst an der Unterelbe / British Art on the Lower Elbe, 1997, pp. 120 and 175, illustration of another example in colour
John Hutchinson, Ernst Gombrich and Lela Njatin, Antony Gormley, London 2000, pp. 160 and 175, illustration of another example in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Winchester, The Great Hall, Domain Field: Antony Gormley, 2004, p. 11, illustration of another example in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Berlin, Georg-Kolbe Museum, Antony Gormley: Bodies in Space, 2007, p. 20, illustration of another example in colour
Michael Mack, Antony Gormley, Göttingen 2007, p. 518, illustration of another example in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a few small spots of oxidisation on the underside of the figure's torso. All surface irregularities are in keeping with the artist's choice of materials and working process.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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."

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.

The idea is that the pieces carry in concentrated form the trace of the body and its passage through life. This has a direct relationship to pain. I see these reduced forms as antennae for a particular kind of resilience that exists within all of us, that allows us to bear suffering but is itself created through painful experience. There is no judgment about this. Their bareness is not the nakedness that reveals the flesh; it is the result of having had the flesh taken away; a loss which is not sentimentalised, but accepted. The Insider tries to up the ante between being and nothingness.

I want them to endure in time and concentrate space. They are made in a durable and relatively permanent base element: iron. The earth has iron at its core and these are like the cooled and revealed magnetic load cores of the body.

Insiders started as an experimentation into a reduction or concentration of the body that was a reverse procedure from the expansion of the body that had concerned me in the late 80s and early 90s. It resulted initially from the reduction of the body that was necessary in the production of the Angel of the North where the body form had to be reduced all over by 12.5 mm in order for the 20 radial ribs to exist half within and half without the original body skin.

The first work that dealt with the Insider theme was a piece called Under My Skin (1997), in which a relatively relaxed body form was reduced all over by 12.5mm and this surface replaced by the ends of about 3,070 12.5mm long pins that were nailed into the surface. This work led me to experimenting with proportional reduction, culminating in Insider I; a work in which all the limbs were taken separately and reduced by 60% on a longitudinal axis, leaving the body the same height but diminishing its cross-section.

The Insider series continued from 2 to 14 and has occupied me for 3 years, from 1996 to 1999. They are all 2/3 reductions of my body, apart from the last 4 in which I used the bodies of 3 female models, and a work based on my first child when just able to stand.

The reductions are achieved by hand, by cutting around 130 cross-sections through the body mould, reducing all of the through measurement and then replacing the reduced cross-sections with the mould and welding them together so that they keep their place precisely at the centre of the form. The only designed parts are the bridges between the torso, links at the hips and shoulders, and between the chest and the breasts or the hips and the penis.

This process of objective mathematical reduction leads to a particular form of abstraction; a found object never revealed before and certainly not invented. It's a body that lies within all of us. 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 constitutes a kind of 'third man', the Insider as alien witness.

Antony Gormley, November 1999