British sculptor Antony Gormley (born 1950) is considered to be one of the most important sculptors today. The Kunsthaus Bregenz (KUB) shows four important art series of the Turner award winner: the series Expansions, Allotment, Critical Mass and Clearing.
The Kunsthaus Bregenz is presenting four important installations by Anthony Gormley from the last 15 years each on individual floors. They point out how Gormley explores and assigns space. Therefore the spectator is challenged to rearrange the perception and condition of his self-image.
The exhibition is joining together 4 central series of Gormleys complete works:
?Expansions?, ?Allotment?, ?Critical Mass? and ?Clearing?.
London born Gormley has been intensively engaged with the sculptural idea of man for 25 years now, the human body and his interaction with the surrounding area. Gormley constantly uses his own body as working and base material like in the 60 life-size iron figures ?Critical Mass II? (1995). Standing ,lying, crouching body shapes leave enough room for association possibilities. In Gormleys opinion they reflect the industrialisation of war as well as the social changes by pointing out the massacres of the 20th and 21st century.
The massive pieces ?Body? and ?Fruit? from Gormleys series ?Expansions? (1991/93) just float inches above the ground. Both of the installations are representing the body shape of a swimmer in starting position. The objects attract through their sheer mass. Their energy and the surrounding space are supposed to give the spectator a direct physical experience.
For ?Allotment II? (1996) the artist took the body sizes of 300 different inhabitants of the Swedish town of Malmö. The rectangular concrete cases symbolise the smallest space possible which is needed to surround an individual. On the first floor they are arranged like an urban landscape. The cavities represent the human bodies living there, which Gormley sees as a meditation of the future of cities.
The whole second floor of the KUB is filled by 12 km long aluminium arcs. As a spectator you can walk through the structure which is representing a thing as well as a sketch. It?s a homage to Julio Gonzalez who embossed the term ?Signs in Space? with his bent iron sculptures.
Gormleys work has already been honoured many times in several exhibitions in Great Britain like the Whitechapel Gallery, the Tate and the Hayward Gallery and other international museums like the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the Cologne Kunstverein in Germany. Blind Light has been shown in the Hayward Gallery in London in 2007. He has been participating in the Venice Biennale and the Documenta 8 in Kassel. ?Angel of the North? and ?Quantum Cloud on the Thames? in Greenwich, London are considered to be one of the most important examples of contemporary sculpture in GB. He has been honoured with the Turner Price in 1994; he received the South Bank award for visual art in 1999 and the Bernhard Heiliger award for Sculpture 2007.
The exhibition runs from 12. July until 4. October 2009.
Further information: http://www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/html/welcome00.htm