An Exhibition Review

Antony Gormley is, of course, the British sculptor renowned for using the human body as the subject for so many of his works. At the beginning of the week I travelled to London to see his exhibition at the Royal Academy and meet up with the youngest for some mother and daughter time. It's an easy enough journey by rail and setting off just after 9am, the youngest was greeting me at Kings Cross a mere two and a half hours later. 

It's strange but when I was working and travelled to London for conferences, I rarely lingered, detesting city life and the oppressive busyness of the streets. Now, in retirement, there's a definite spring in my step heading for the bright lights. Perhaps without a briefcase in my hand I feel better able to attack the vibrancy on offer or maybe a rural retirement is so quiet that there are occasions when a faster pace is alluring.

I enjoy too an exhibition of one person's work showing the progression of themes over several decades. In this respect the display of sketches in notebooks and drawings where thick black pigment and linseed oil dominate, did not disappoint. Indeed there was something almost dystopian about many of the pictures  as Gormley sought to evoke what it feels like to be in a body.

For someone best known for his outdoor sculptures, not least the Angel of the North, I was a little cynical as to how the confines of the Royal Academy could possibly show off his work but it does and to impressive effect as he takes us on a journey through our interior forms and surroundings. 

There are examples of his early works with one gallery devoted to the essentials of life and tools for survival including a piece (Mother's Pride V) constructed out of slices of white bread with the shape of a human body bitten out of them. His trademark iron casts of his own body protrude from the floor, walls and ceiling of another gallery in what is aptly named Lost Horizon 1. Much of the exhibition, however, showcases his more recent style of working with stacked steel slabs creating various human poses or a life size body built from steel bars demonstrating what Gromley describes as "the zone of life beneath the skin."

The environment is represented by one space filled with coiled aluminium tube (Clearing VII) similar to a magnetic field or alternatively, it is suggested, childish scribble . A labyrinth of steel mesh (Matrix III) hangs from the ceiling in the Main Gallery  and Gormley describes this as "the ghost of the environment we've all chosen to accept as our primary habitat." There is a cave (Cave) that you walk into through a tunnel so dark that it is impossible to find your way, other than by feeling along the side of the wall and advancing slowly in an "experience of interiorised darkness." Finally you see Host where below the gallery's ornate gilded ceiling a floor covered in clay has been filled with sea water and the viewer is invited to determine whether it represents an image of creation or devastation.

What can I say, other than that, although the prime motivation for my visit was to catch up with the youngest, the exhibition alone was well worth a day trip to London for. If you can't make it to Burlington House before it closes on 3rd December, do take a look at the Royal Academy's website where there is a video tour and photographs far superior to my own.