Antony Gormley

Collection of the artist (donated: Sotheby's, London, June 30, 2011, lot 238)
Acquired at the above sale by A. Alfred Taubman

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. The oxidized surface is inherent to the artist’s intent and chosen medium. Under close inspection, a few pinpoint drip accretions are visible on the figure’s right shoulder.
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Antony Gormley’s Measure III departs from the obsession with movement that has characterized figuration in the history of Western sculpture. The blockworks series as a whole is an attempt to marry the rules of architecture and its absolute geometries to the artist’s longstanding sculptural exploration of the body as our primary habitat. This work, in the manner of an architectural model, presents the body at half life-size scale.

These cast blockworks replace anatomy with architectonic volumes using stacking, cantilever and balance to achieve a strong structure that is nevertheless dynamic.

Increasingly in this continuing exploration, blocks have become more robust, often extending beyond the skin in an attempt to evoke particular feelings and tensions.  The artist comments: "the blockworks describe the space of the body in stacked masses that question its stability. In this work, an early example of what became known as beamers, I use the construction language of the built world; pillars and lintels, to evoke the inner condition of the body, each element stretching across the volume of the bodyspace and finishing at the skin." The resulting work seems to evoke the feeling of the body volume from within, treating the body less as a thing than a place.

There is a tension between a suggested symmetry and the actual articulation of a body, so that very slight variations in the alignment of the blocks can be read empathetically as an indication of a total body feeling. These pieces attempt to treat the body as a condition, in the artist’s words: "being, not doing."