‘Antony Gormley’ at the Royal Academy, London, until the 3rd December 2019: ★★★★☆
I like Antony Gormley. I think you would be hard pushed to find someone who didn’t – at the very least they’d be indifferent towards him. And that, in a nutshell, is the issue.
Everyone knows the rusted, featureless casts of his body, they’re scattered around the country – from the roof-tops of our public buildings to our desolate beaches and they’re knee deep in our rivers. He’s ‘The Angel of the North Guy’ – he’s very safe. The Gormley everybody knows is thought provoking but also Instagramable, modern but not frightening.
But don’t get me wrong here, these are not wholly negative comments – as I said, I like Gormley. However, it is because of this public image that I found myself going to his newly opened, major show at the RA (a great honour for any living British artist) looking for another side to Gormley – something other than the isolated, standing men, something to break that mould and allow me to see him afresh.
To some extent he delivered. Three large works stand out, each entirely filling their vast rooms in the RA’s main galleries. The first, ‘Clearing VII (2019)’, is made up of eight kilometres of coiling metal tubing that has been allowed to expand into the space like a gas. One must, therefore, scramble over, under, and through it to reach the rooms beyond. Described by the artist as the ‘Laocoön for the quantum age’, it certainly evokes a similar straining, twisting energy as that icon of antiquity but with a cold, hard edge that had become Gormley’s signature.
We find ourselves in a monochrome zeitgeist, with much of the colour having been chased out of contemporary art long ago – and this show does not try to rock that particular boat. Blacks, greys, whites, and the occasional spot of oxidised russet mark the extent of Gormley’s pallet in this subdued show.
The second of the large works, ‘Matrix III (2019)’, is a geometric cloud of grey metal work that floats just above head height. It could almost be considered Op-art in the way it plays with your vision and depth of field – not something one usually expects from Gormley and a refreshing change.
The final of the big three is ‘Cave (2019)’. Guided by a gallery assistant into a claustrophobia inducing, rectangular steel tunnel you feel your way through the darkness until you arrive in an altogether convincing natural cave space with some shafts open to the light above. After our eyes adjust the geometric steel slabs that make up the space become apparent, although it is not until coming out the other side that one becomes aware that the whole cave system was contained within a block-y giant, laid on its side in the fetal position. Both entertaining and thought provoking in its challenge to our perception, this work really stands apart from the standard Gormley.
The expected iron men are, of course, there, but in fairness they are displayed in an interesting way – as if walking on all the surfaces in the room like an Escher illustration. There are also some works that feel a bit lacking – two large rotten apple-like forms hang from the glass dome of a room with seemingly little to say for themselves and the room filled, a foot deep, with muddy sea water provides not much more than a photo opportunity. Similarly, the three rooms dedicated to Gormley’s drawings and notebooks left me wanting – they offer no great revelation as to the mind and method of the artist, neither are they especially beautiful in themselves.
That being said, this is a show worth seeing. There is no denying that Gormley is one of the most significant and popular living artists in Britain, but there are moments in this show that remind us he still has the power to enlighten and impress with his industrial, weighty works.
Morgan Haigh 