黑料不打烊

White Cube is pleased to present 鈥業n Formation鈥� by Antony Gormley, an exhibition of new cast iron work that questions to what extent we are the product of our environment, and to what extent we are makers of it.

On the ground floor are four 鈥楽tack鈥� works: massive, one and a half life-size sculptures built from solid cast iron blocks that each weigh between 11 and 700 kilos. The component parts are loose and use dead weight as a principle of construction; it is the subtle inflection of how one block takes the load from another that suggests the attitudes of repose, lamentation or alertness of the whole. Freshly unearthed from foundry sand, the blocks have the appearance of stone in their organic, silvered surfaces. Evoking the idea of the column, Gormley sees them as 鈥榬everse caryatids鈥�, sculpted figures that served as architectural pillars in the ancient world. Rather than offering reinforcement, however, these 鈥楽tacks鈥� lean on the walls for support.

If the works on the ground floor reflect our dependency on the built environment, those in the lower gallery investigate the consequences of our ability to manipulate matter. The nine new blockworks, called 鈥楢ggregates鈥�, are made up of aggregated blocks that treat matter as information and use the language of code to suggest both struggle and symbiosis between body and block. Each rusted figure appears to extricate itself or to take support from a material mass, referencing Michelangelo鈥檚 famous 鈥楽laves鈥� (1513 鈥� 16), where a body is emerging out of the solid block. Here Gormley asks, 鈥業s the body the product of the block, or the block the product of the body?鈥�

Discussing his interest in the transformation that digitalisation has engendered in the way we relate to the world and ourselves, Gormley has spoken of this 鈥榥ot as a noble conflict between spirit and matter, but an overturning of fixed principles that gives way to a continual and fluid translation from information into form and from form into information鈥�. Works such as Pack (2019) admit to the ability of our technology to reveal and confound, just as Hold (2019) suggests a tussle between code and iron, where form and medium are so locked together as to be indistinguishable. In making the pixel physical, the 鈥楢ggregate鈥� works make palpable the ways in which we are now engaged with a new way of being and becoming in the world, what Gormley calls 鈥榓 mortal struggle between the immanent and the manifest鈥�.

The works in this exhibition are part of Gormley鈥檚 ongoing questioning of the human project in light of our industrial inheritance, our embodied selves at a time of perpetual mutability and the knowledge we now have of our profound effect on the elemental world.