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拍品专文
Executed in 2016, Antony Gormley’s Big Shy forms part of the artist’s series of ‘Big Beamers’ (2014-2016). The present work, like so much of the artist’s oeuvre, is modelled on Gormley’s own body. Impressive in scale, this is one of only seven works in the series, for which Gormley enlarged his own form to one and a half times its original size. Continuing Gormley’s career-defining investigation of the body within and as space, these works are comprised of interlocking steel beams which utilise the constructional principles of architecture. Gormley was particularly inspired by the remarkable platform of a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, the Kiyomizu-dera. Concerned with the emotional valence of the body as object, Big Shy conveys an introspection that is strikingly anthropomorphic. Two works from the ‘Big Beamers’ series, Big Pluck 2 (2016) and Big Yield (2015), are held in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth.
The ‘Big Beamers’ follow the earlier ‘Constructed Beamers’ (2010-2024) and ‘Cast Beamers’ (2009-2014). In each series, Gormley used the three Cartesian coordinates of architectural practice and the language of Modernism to forge a cartography of the body. Each work is comprised of beams running on all three axes of the human body and touching its edges at each end, an approach Gormley refined across these series by using progressively fewer elements to capture the contours of the human form. The ‘Beamers’ emerged from the early ‘Blockworks,’ which Gormley has evolved through multiple series dating back to 2001, and which marked the artist’s earliest attempts to make a body as building. ‘In applying the rules of architecture and its absolute geometries, using an objective register of a particular human life, I try to let an improvised construction evoke an internal state’, he explains (A. Gormley, artist’s website). Adopting the structural applications of post and lintel architecture, Gormley’s skeletal bodies speak to the monumentality of the built world within the vital and emotive pulse of the human.
The gapped structure of the present work achieves a sense of balance and equilibrium. Space is held equally by the clean, solid steel blocks of Big Shy, and the porous intervals between, maintaining a tension between density and weightlessness, absence and presence. Shifting light shapes and reshapes its contours, and air seeps through its voids, becoming mass. Big Shy’s towering form holds the solemnity and gravitas of the built world, affirming the ways in which the body commands and shapes space, and evolving the viewer’s awareness of their own embodiment.
The ‘Big Beamers’ follow the earlier ‘Constructed Beamers’ (2010-2024) and ‘Cast Beamers’ (2009-2014). In each series, Gormley used the three Cartesian coordinates of architectural practice and the language of Modernism to forge a cartography of the body. Each work is comprised of beams running on all three axes of the human body and touching its edges at each end, an approach Gormley refined across these series by using progressively fewer elements to capture the contours of the human form. The ‘Beamers’ emerged from the early ‘Blockworks,’ which Gormley has evolved through multiple series dating back to 2001, and which marked the artist’s earliest attempts to make a body as building. ‘In applying the rules of architecture and its absolute geometries, using an objective register of a particular human life, I try to let an improvised construction evoke an internal state’, he explains (A. Gormley, artist’s website). Adopting the structural applications of post and lintel architecture, Gormley’s skeletal bodies speak to the monumentality of the built world within the vital and emotive pulse of the human.
The gapped structure of the present work achieves a sense of balance and equilibrium. Space is held equally by the clean, solid steel blocks of Big Shy, and the porous intervals between, maintaining a tension between density and weightlessness, absence and presence. Shifting light shapes and reshapes its contours, and air seeps through its voids, becoming mass. Big Shy’s towering form holds the solemnity and gravitas of the built world, affirming the ways in which the body commands and shapes space, and evolving the viewer’s awareness of their own embodiment.