Together, clay and lead form an important and foundational duality in Antony Gormley’s oeuvre. They represent two ends of a material spectrum in which openness is pitched against restraint, warm against cool, hard against soft. In Night and Day these dualities are brought into clear focus: from the open end of a heavy lead pipe, twenty-seven diminutive and unique terracotta figures emerge, marching into our space. The work’s title here underlines the polar oppositions conjured by the artist’s material and formal juxtapositions: as night is to day and handmade is to manmade, organically moulded human figures are here distinct from the industrial geometry of the sculpture’s brutalist lead pipe. Following his breakthrough works of 1981-82 – the lead body cases hammered and welded into a catalogue of archetypal poses – Gormley began using clay as a welcome respite from the physical task of beating metal into human form. Spontaneous, responsive and vital, clay brought an important humanistic and earthly dimension to this formative period in Gormley’s career. In the artist’s own words: “…the first dialogue with clay, the opening of the closed shell; all of those pieces were trying in different ways to contradict the determinism of the hermetic that is so part of the lead ethos” (Antony Gormley cited in: Martin Cagier Smith, Antony Gormley, New York 2017, p. 130).

Dated 1988, the present work evolved over a five-year period. Spanning the very first instance of clay’s appearance as a counterpart to lead case forms in works such as Out of this World (1983-84) and Work (1984), Night and Day also anticipates his most ambitious work in terracotta, the acclaimed opus of installation pieces called Field (1989 – 2003). In its most complete iteration, thousands of diminutive red-orange forms, rudimentary in facture and each sporting two shallow holes for eyes, occupy and fill their given gallery space. A legion of tiny bodies hand-moulded from elemental earth-matter, these are confrontational and deeply humanistic works. Initially created with the help of friends and neighbours, Gormley expanded his project by enlisting the help of local communities, first in Mexico for American Field of 1991, and later those in the Amazon, the British Isles, Europe, and China. Indeed, conceived as an intentionally communal, or “tribal”, enterprise, these works in terracotta brought him out of “a crisis”, Gormley has explained, “to do with feeling trapped within this privileged position of the Western artist, working in his own space in his own time” (Antony Gormley, cited in: Ibid., p. 171).  Formed by many individuals across diverse cultures, these works are deeply connected to the earth from which they are made and the human hands that formed them; this is what clay brings for Gormley, it is a way of connecting his practice to a greater network, opening it out to a wider sphere. Where lead, with its alchemical significance as a base material of transformative potential, put forth spatial propositions centred on individual human encasements, Gormley’s loosely articulated clay figures symbolise the multitudinous, the many, the populous; they are humanity on an intimate yet grand scale. Presaging this ambitious project, Night and Day presents a vision that confronts the future. Closely related to the major work Man Asleep (1985) in which a procession of clay bodies march away from a sleeping lead body, Night and Day forms a clear link between a closed inner state of consciousness and the world at large.