Xavier Hufkens is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works by the English sculptor Antony Gormley. The new exhibition will be his fourth at the gallery.

Since the beginning of his career in the late seventies, Antony Gormley ( °1950, London ) has consistently taken the human body as the central focus of his art. All his work starts from a lived moment; a significant work for him is, by definition, a place in the world, like the body that is inhabited by the spectator or the artist. The new exhibition: “You and Nothing” is a psychic gymnasium in which the objects are instruments to test the assumptions about self and other that underpin our being in the world.

Feeling Material XVIII is a three dimensional drawing made around the space left by two bodies that face each other creating a field of polarity which extends into the surrounding space. It is formed from an unending loop of 678 meters of 5mm square polished stainless steel. This is contrasted in the first room by You, a solid iron body-form that has been exposed to the elements and seems to express absolute rest yet invites your empathic inhabitation.

The second room revisits some of the early experiential exercises of Bruce Nauman but in the language of children’s building blocks. However, any childish connotations are left behind in the hard steel and absolute geometry of the blocks and their interrelated sizes. With titles like Stand, Stack, Lie, Grip ( all words that are both verbs and nouns ) actions are translated into states. The space of the inner body has been transformed into a dynamic of weight and lightness where, in Grip for example, the fist-like contraction of the work is contrasted with a floatation of each block . Here the stillness of sculpture is translated into a dynamic pull and push of mass and space .

A new kind of drawing has arisen in the work with the latest very linear pieces – Shift and Spine – both made from thin stainless steel rod with black carbonisation where the metal has been welded together giving the effect of synaptic energy with pathways mapping the body into a web of connectivity. In Hive this is translated into a wall-hugging hexagonal matrix – whereas in Shift the same body-void is left as a fragile memory of a place where a body once was.

With these works are three of his most recent experiments in iron casting, derived from the blockworks but with a more earthy presence. Cotch, Settle and Stake all attempt to express the inherent qualities of the mineral and its ability to take indelible fixes from lived experience while still referring to the way that space is defined by architecture.

The work of Antony Gormley is included in many major public collections worldwide, such as: The Tate Gallery, London, England; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland; The Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; The Hakone Open-air Museum, Tokyo, Japan; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; The Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.