2024-09-10 08:02:25
“It would be said that the sculptures are still and silent. But they resemble a catalyst. They evoke movement, and therefore experience,” describes Sir Antony Gormley from his studio in central London. Starting this week, the most important living British sculptor is exhibiting in Prague’s Rudolfinum Gallery together with the Czech architect Pavla Melková.
For most English people, including those not interested in art, the 74-year-old holder of the Order of the British Empire is “the one who created the Angel of the North”. Since the late 1990s, the 20-metre steel sculpture with outstretched wings has looked down from a hill near the northern town of Gateshead over a landscape that was once home to mining, steel and shipbuilding.
The statue of Antony Gormley was created by shipwrights who lost their jobs when the local mines and steel mills closed. It became a symbol of the transition from the industrial to the information age. “The Angel of the North was an attempt to create a work that would break free from the logic of commerce and the institutions controlling contemporary art. It was an attempt to acknowledge the tradition that is so impressively recorded in Europe in the form of Gothic cathedrals,” recalls Gormley.
The podcast with Antony Gormley can be heard here:
The mention of medieval cathedrals belongs to his world. The youngest of seven children of a German mother and an Irish father, he grew up in a family with a strict Catholic upbringing. “They probably still accompany me, even though I hate the logic of sugar and the whip, the dialectic of sin and grace, the hierarchical system of the church with its patriarchal nature. I was raised by Benedictine monks who believed that they were responsible for my spiritual development. I feel a deep gratitude to those men who for me, in a certain sense, they were more important than my own parents,” he states.
No less significant for his thinking were trips to India, where Gormley, like many young Britons, went in the late 1960s after studying archaeology, anthropology and art history at Cambridge University. Learning from Buddhist masters and a life that takes place directly on the streets, including sleeping, changed the future sculptor’s approach to creation.
“Since then, I’ve been using my own body as a testing laboratory, tool and material. Which means a departure from much of Western art, which is so often concerned with creating images of what we already know. With all due respect to Albert Giacometti, for example, his stuff exemplifies approach, where the artist looks at the original and creates a work testifying to the distance between the original and the author. My Prague exhibition can be understood as a response to Giacometti,” describes Gormley.
The show at the Rudolfinum Gallery will last until January 5, 2025. The new director of this institution, Julia Tatiana Bailey, and Pavla Melková, as the author of the texts that conduct an interview with the work of the British creator, are signed as curators. Dialogue is often compared to two-way movement; Gormley invites visitors too.
In the first large hall, for example, people will crawl through a work called Orbit Field. The Englishman created this spatial installation from large aluminum circles directly for the Prague gallery. Twenty-seven several-meter-high objects intersect each other over the entire area of the room, so the visitor has to step into them to get further.
Another large hall called the Crossing contains a large structure made of aluminum surface-treated so that it glows in the dark. “My main question is how to draw art directly into the center of life and not close it somewhere in a showcase,” said Gormley when he personally presented the exhibition in Prague.
Acknowledging that the visitor feels like running around here is a sign of acceptance. “Great, go for it. Watch your feet and your head when you run. I think the call to move is the effect of sculpture,” he responds. “I would like children to invade here, for interested visitors to dance through the space. To be initiated into art, not to be told what would be good if they took away from it,” concludes Antony Gormley.
Welcome to the Na dotek podcast. Petr Vizina’s guest is the sculptor Antony Gormley. To listen on the Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Spreaker platforms.