ANTONY GORMLEY

(B. 1950)

BREATHE
2016

Footnotes

Provenance
Alan Cristea Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2016

Exhibited
London, Alan Cristea Gallery, Antony Gormley: CAST, 2016, p. 33, no. 10, illustrated in colour

Literature
Martin Caiger-Smith, Antony Gormley, New York 2017, p. 407, illustrated in colour
Le Gallerie degli Uffizi, Antony Gormley ESSERE, Florence 2019, p. 71, no. 3, illustrated in colour



Born in London in 1950, Antony Gormley is not only widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations, and public artworks, but also for a truly remarkable body of drawings. Not unlike a modern-day Leonardo Da Vinci, his drawings are tinged with washes, varnishes, dyes, oil, earth and even blood amongst more traditional media and they serve as much more than just a way to record his surroundings. Always with a workbook at hand, Gormley's drawings form an artistic corpus in its own right and whilst there are visual parallels with his larger three-dimensional work, they go far beyond mere preparatory studies. He is "going places in the drawing that are not possible in life or sculpture: outer space or deep water" ('BODY AND LIGHT, 1990 – 1996', www.antonygormley.com, 22.02.2022), the process of drawing itself becoming a meditative as well as creative exercise.

Gormley draws the viewer in, makes them both spectator and participant in his work by questioning and exploring where human beings as a whole and the human body in particular stand in relation to the space in which they exist; be it a small room, nature, or the cosmos. This was perhaps nowhere more palpable than in his recent critically acclaimed solo show at the Royal Academy where he filled the institution's thirteen vast main galleries with astonishing larger-than-life sculptures and installations. An entire room there was dedicated to drawing, showing the sheer diversity, range, and importance of this part of his oeuvre.

Perhaps best known for Angel of the North near Gateshead, Gormley is a monumental figure, both in eminence and stature. His own 6ft 4in tall frame functions as a mould for his sculptural work and as a brush in his drawings which often involve the physical activity of the entire body. Works like the Clearing drawings convey considerable speed and velocity used in their creation, and in life-sized, ethereal Body Prints such as the present work, Gormley himself becomes the painting apparatus. The series of unique works was developed for the exhibition CAST at Alan Cristea Gallery in London in 2016, which explored how our own physical freedom and imaginative potential is progressively more conditioned by the environment we have built and the dependencies we have constructed around us. A number of large woodblock prints based on seven distinct body poses that reinterpreted anatomy in the language of architecture were interspersed with a series of crude oil and petroleum jelly Body Prints. Titles ranged from OPEN to FEEL, SEE, SHOW and the present work, BREATHE. Whilst the woodblock prints relate to Expansion Field (2014) a work which "applies the principles of an expanding universe to the subjective space of the body" ('CAST, ALAN CRISTEA GALLERY, LONDON, ENGLAND, 2016', www.antonygormley.com, 22.02.2022), the use of crude oil in the artist's body prints has an avowedly political context.

To create the transfer, Gormley covered himself in crude oil, linseed oil and petroleum jelly and, with the help of two assistants and two long poles, he would fall onto the handmade paper, the weight of his body creating a corresponding, ghost like imprint. As the 'blood of the earth' slowly seeps into the fabric of the sheet, a kind of halo forms around the figure, imbuing the work with a sacral feel. Having grown up in a devoutly Catholic home, Gormley turned away from the church at the age of eighteen towards Buddhism and became interested in vipassana meditation which he often uses in his artistic practice. The use of 350-million-year-old carboniferous Texan crude mixed with North Dakota oil to perfect the colour shade and effect is meant to highlight our dependency on petrochemicals. The oil represents the planet's DNA, its solar memory, a result of age-old photosynthesis in a time where we have our own capacity to harness the power of the sun and perform a sort of industrialised photosynthesis. The Body Prints act as a memorial to a time in which our dependency on fossil fuels was on the ebb though still pronounced.

Antony Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the Praemium Imperiale in 2013 and has been a Royal Academician since 2003. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year's Honours list in 2014. Gormley's work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with recent exhibitions at National Gallery Singapore, Singapore (2021); the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019): Delos, Greece (2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2019) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2019). Permanent public works around the globe include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Inside Australia (Lake Ballard, Western Australia), Exposure (Lelystad, The Netherlands) and Chord (MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA). Highly political in much of his oeuvre, he uses the strength of his market and public popularity to highlight injustice and confront us with our own needs, our relationship to the planet, other lifeforms and the cosmos.