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This exhibition brings together my most recent attempts to reconcile the first and the second body; if the first body, our material, biological body, is our first dwelling, then the second is our built environment, which we have become part of and largely dependent upon. These works attempt to map and materialise the interactions between these two bodies.—Antony Gormley

Conceived for Villa Kast and responding to the context of this former family home, the exhibition Umwelt comprises sculptures from Antony Gormley’s recent investigations in living space where the body is seen as a place rather than an object. As the title indicates, the works on view explore in drawing and sculpture the dynamics between the internal condition of the human body and its environment (‘Umwelt’), testing its boundaries and permeability. ‘On one level, the human body can be understood as a closed system,’ states the artist, ‘but on another level, it is open to all the variables of its context. The question of where our bodies end and surroundings begin is an open question and leads to open work.’

As this exhibition’s immediate context, Villa Kast has been useful to Gormley’s purpose: here is a nineteenth century house that has been abstracted and, since 1989, transformed into a space for art. The surrounding architecture still bares faint traces of its familial past. The villa’s rooms are now uncannily re-inhabited by Gormley’s sculptures, which activate the house and allow it to become a zone for reflexive thinking and feeling. While mapping the human body, the works on display simultaneously highlight the symbiotic relationship between bodies and their surrounding environments.

This exhibition presents for the first time a group of ‘Extended Strapworks’ that Gormley has developed over the last two and a half years. Linear and open, these sculptures comprise two or four circuits of rusted ribbon steel in the form of Möbius strips that pass around the space surrounding a single body. Sculptures such as Dwell (2022) and Implicate III (2022) break the body-boundary and reach out towards the edges of the spaces they inhabit, recognising how a room’s orthogonality affects our internal perception of space. Seen through the villa’s many doorways and apertures, the sculptures seem to extend out infinitely, stretching beyond the confines of the rooms. For the artist, the lack of a definable body-boundary poses the question of ‘where the body begins and ends and to what extent we, having made the world, are then made by it.’ In the exhibition, Gormley has also included earlier works, such as two ‘Blockworks’ downstairs and an ‘Open Blockwork’ in the library upstairs, to share the origin of the ‘Extended Strapworks’’ orthogonality.