Body Politic

Went to see an Antony Gormley exhibition a while back and took these. It’s always a pleasure to look at his art, and to see how he re-interprets his own body through various scales and mediums. The sculptures are all based on the proportions of his body, and I found the brick ones especially fascinating as you could see that each brick referred to each joint/muscle group of the body (I particularly liked the square buttock bricks). The theme of the exhibition was a serious one, so if you want to find out more, you can watch this film where Gormley talks about the inspiration for this work. He’s such an intelligent artist, and has interesting messages embedded in his art.

P.S. I’m also glad I caught the man in the last pic mimicking one of the sculptures 🤗

An arty November Sunday

Let’s continue with back tracking through my 2019, shall we? On a Sunday back in November, we went with a couple of friends to see the Antony Gormley exhibition at the Royal Academy. I’m lucky enough to be able to go to exhibitions on weekdays when it’s less busy, but we this time we went on what must be the busiest day in the week. It was actually quite nice to feel more collectively that we were sharing an experience with a lot of people at the same time.

Our friend’s daughter mimicked the statues throughout the exhibition which made us chuckle.

Most of the rooms were so busy that you had to simply walk behind each other in a circle to have a look at whatever was in the middle, like some sort of circle dance.

I have no idea how they managed to fix most of the art works into the spaces without wrecking the place, and I must say I enjoyed the contrast between his modern sculptures placed within the very classical Royal Academy.

Here we had to squeeze our way through, walking around the perimeter of it, in a neat little line.

This room could only be seen though a door opening, the whole floor was filled with water. Would have been fun if you could wade your way through it :)

We couldn’t figure out how they’d installed these thin metal rods that would span across four rooms or so, without them bending at all. So much of Gormley’s stuff makes you wonder “What the?! How the?!”.

I think this was hand drawn with chalk. Made your eyes hurt.

My favourite parts of the exhibition were his early watercolour work, as well as his notebooks. If I was to steal one thing from the show it would have been this last rusty coloured painting. Ha - just realised that it’s yet another painting with someone facing away, and here in silhouette, which reminds me a lot of a certain someone’s photographs… hmmmm.