Galleria Continua is pleased to present Body buildings, Antony Gormley’s third solo exhibition at the 798 Art District in Beijing following Another singularity (2009) and Host (2016). Body buildings interrogates our species’ relationship to the built environment, an increasingly high-rise world we rarely escape. In a significant group of recent sculptures and drawings, Gormley uses clay and iron, two ubiquitous materials of the built world, ‘to think and feel the body in this condition’.

The central work in the exhibition, Resting place II, conjures a dense labyrinthine terrain that viewers are invited to enter and navigate. This field of 132 life-size bodies, each built from fired clay bricks stacked atop one another, investigates the body at rest as our primary dwelling place. For the artist, the brick is a ‘physical pixel’ that plays an important role in Chinese culture.

Constructed in different orthogonal yet precarious positions, the bodies evoke a range of conditions, from splayed relaxation to foetal self-protection. When viewed from the gallery’s first and second-floor balconies, the interplay between moving visitors and horizontal clay bodies creates a dynamic f ield in which the particularity of subjective experience is at work.

As Gormley has said: ‘Resting place II evokes the human body’s relationship to the ground, the surface of the earth. It refers to two very different kinds of abandonment: the relaxed abandonment of the body on the beach, the place to which we return in childhood play and relaxation, and another, that of the migrant who has either forcibly or freely sought a new home. What at first looks like a chaotic display of building materials might resolve into the model of a city and further resolve into the invitation to empathise with the body as a place of indwelling, some evoking states of deep relaxation and contentment, others of retreat and defence.’

Accompanying Resting place II are sculptures cast in iron, such as Circuit and ally, which explore parallels between urban infrastructure— roads, electrical circuits, plumbing—and human relationships. Circuit transforms these networks into a circulatory system shared by two bodies, while Ally uses stacks of massive cast iron blocks to test how two bodies can find mutual stability through a shared centre of gravity. These explorations of proximity and intimacy ask to what extent the urban environment shapes and mirrors human connections.

On either side of Circuit are Short and Shame, two works that treat the body as an independent energy field in which the body veers from its centre of gravity, purposefully avoiding the stability associated with statues of power. In a series of tight knots, Shame identifies places of tension within the body— ankles, knees, pelvis, head and hands— while Short escapes the bounding condition of the skin as the iron lines move from inside the body to beyond its apparent surface.

On the gallery’s top floor, Rule III and Buttress transform body space into latticed scaffolding, familiar to us in the skeletons of contemporary high-rise architecture. In doing so, the works materialise the way that having made a world, it now makes us. The two rusting bodies are placed directly against the walls, implicating the architectural context and making visitors aware of their relationship to the built environment.

The sculptures are accompanied by a series of drawings. Singularity X and Event VII evoke the luminous beginnings of astral matter. They are complemented by a series of layered ‘Lux’ drawings that refer to apertures or sources of light glimpsed from within interiors. Other drawings made using inkcap mushroom ink as well as carbon and casein examine darkness as experienced inside the body and in proximity to another.

Body buildings is an interrogation of the state of our species. Gormley offers these sculptures as diagnostic tools to examine our present condition.

Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship between the human body and space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others, confronting fundamental questions about where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually seeks to identify the space of art as a place of becoming, where new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.

Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at Musée Rodin, Paris (2023); TAG Art Museum, Qingdao (2023); Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg (2022); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (2022); National Gallery Singapore, Singapore (2021); Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Germany (2021); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); Delos, Greece (2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2019); Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA (2019); Long Museum, Shanghai (2017); National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Forte di Belvedere, Florence (2015); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2014); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasília (2012); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2012); The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1993); and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (1989).

Permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another place (Crosby Beach, England), Inside Australia (Lake Ballard, Western Australia), Exposure (Lelystad, the Netherlands), Chord (MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA) and Alert (Imperial College London, England). Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007, the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2013. 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. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge.

Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003. Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950.