The London Traveler

I’ve been fascinated by Antony Gormley’s work for a long time. As I type, one of his ‘energy’ bodies from the exhibition at the Baltic, Gateshead, is looking over me – a body formed of black scratched ink marks, crackling with energy as if the body is every moment being formed by atoms whirling in space, coming together and flying apart.

White Cube has just opened a new exhibition by Gormley at its Mason’s Yard gallery. One of the two installations, ‘Lost Horizon’, is unsurprising – as so often, Gormley takes his own body as the subject. He has created casts, and arranged them around the gallery – hanging from the ceiling, sticking out from the walls, at different angles, in different configurations. Somehow, it doesn’t have the majesty of his ‘Field’, his surprising terracotta army of little gaping figures, or the fizzing energy and fragility of his ‘Domain Field’ at the Baltic.

But the piece downstairs is much more interesting. ‘Firmament’ is loosely modelled on the shape of a human body, but it’s entirely created out of what looks like steel meccano. It’s transparent, like a steel spider’s web. It seems slightly science-fiction. It explores our sense of inside and outside; dissolving form into a grid. Is it a figure or a landscape? Is it a claustrophobic interior, or is it open to the horizon?

The exhibition has already got a stinker of a review in the Telegraph which I’m not sure was deserved. Go and find out for yourself.

White Cube, Mason’s Yard, off Duke Street, St James’s, London SW1. (Piccadilly Circus or Green Park tube stations.)

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