Antony Gormley, Second Body
at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac looks culturally dislocated settled within its inner city Parisian setting. Looking more like an organic farm shop in Surrey than a contemporary exhibition space, this unusual and unlikely venue is currently playing fantastic host to world famous and British born sculptor Antony Gormely.
The generous, lofty spaces of the gallery’s Paris Zone 2 location allows Gormley’s fields* of sculptures to react and interact both with each other and participating audiences. The a expansive 4-room installation of works allows viewers to move freely amongst and within the forms that (as the title suggests) all have relatable scales and aspects of the human body, that seek to challenge the relationships between bodies and architecture. The works ‘objectif(y) and internalize(e) the relationship between a perceiving human body and its habitat by mining and pesforating the normally closed body-volumes using the languages of cells, corridors, shafts and windows, presenting the subjective body as a mansion of many chambers.’
*The collective grouping of sculptural works to generate large-scale installation ‘fields’ has reappeared many times throughout Gormley’s artistic career. One of his most well recognized installations ‘Field for the British Isles’ (1991) comprises of thousands of small hand-sculpted figures that fill the exhibition space, rendering it inaccessible. Read more: http://www.antonygormley.com/resources/essay-item/id/108
Gallery Press Release: ‘… The exhibition continues the artist’s investigation of body and space, interrogating the body as place and architecture as the primary conditioner of our experience of space. Antony Gormley fully exploits the scale and volumes of the former foundry sheds that now form the gallery, catalysing our experience of space and time through works that either constitute or are arranged as “fields”. In a recent statement, the artist describes being “increasingly interested in the tropes of framing, containing and constructing being freed from architecture’s shelter function… to make a psychological architecture that allows surface and mass, light and dark, open and closed volumes free play in works that become places for an adventure in real time.”
How to get there:
RER E: Station "Pantin". (Turn left behind the city hall and walk straight down on avenue Général Leclerc. The gallery will be on your left after the bridge- 5 mins)
Metro: Line 5, "Eglise de Pantin" (Exit rue Delizy. Turn right into rue Delizy, afterwards turn right into avenue Général Leclerc. The gallery will be on your left after the bridge- 10 mins) More information on the gallery webiste: http://ropac.net/place_current_exhibitions/paris-pantin Words and images by Carys Fieldson