The British sculptor Antony Gormley has redefined the boundaries of sculpture and is considered one of the most important artists of our time. Recently, a selection of his drawings illustrated the 2023 Salzburg Festival programme. One of these drawings, titled Sight (1987), became an emblem for this year’s Festival.
Antony Gormley, Expanded Family X 5: PROP, 2014, Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul, Photo: Jürgen Brinkmann
In this work, an ever-widening gaze stretches into the distance, or a narrow, laser-like beam pries open a chink into eternity. Through the power of light, darkness is effaced and our visual perception is ignited. The 2023 Festival programme spans this very same spectrum between light and dark: from the artistic legacy of the Enlightenment to works that evoke dark images of obsession, delusion and rage; from serenely cheerful late masterpieces to compositions that radiate with the splendour of eternal light.
Sight (1987), became an emblem for this year’s Salzburg Festival
It therefore felt only right to ask Antony Gormley to exhibit a group of large-scale sculptures in the same venue where the 2023 Salzburg Festival gets underway. With this year’s Ouverture spirituelle devoted to the theme of ‘Lux aeterna’, our ears will be drawn to the eternal light – ‘a soft light that seems to come from far away in time and space’ (György Ligeti).
We would like to thank both Antony Gormley and Thaddaeus Ropac for facilitating this dialogue with the Ouverture spirituelle, which will see five sculptures from the artist’s ‘Tankers’ series displayed in the Kollegienkirche for two weeks: 29 July through 13 August, daily 10 am to 7 pm.
These five steel sculptures are derived from the human body and transform its mass into ever-expanding dark voids held within hermetically sealed tanks. Here are sculptural forms that reconcile the limitless with the bounded, conflating the body’s ability to contain the mind with architecture’s ability to enclose the body.
The sculptures are arranged in a row and are turned to face the viewer as they enter. Are they bowing to God, or hunched over, paying respect to the earth?
The dark figures, made of Corten steel and weighing up to 387 kilograms, pose a visually striking contrast to the airy ‘white church’ designed by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, which was built between 1696 and 1707 and is dedicated to the sciences. These looming dark presences encroach upon the spiritual domain and carve out a space for themselves.
Antony Gormley in Gallery Thaddaeus Ropac, photo Parnass
Antony Gormley: ‘What you see and how you feel are never the same. This presentation tests the relationship between what something feels like and its external appearance. The first work shows the origin of the expansion and is the result of living, experienced time becoming objectified in a frame. Together, the works express the provisional boundary of subjective experience, specifically as it relates to interior space – a place that has no absolute dimension. The hermetic skin of the sculpture isolates a dark space in space that, while paradoxically becoming visible, is unseeable and unknowable, evoking the imaginative potential of the darkness of the body: the space you enter when you close your eyes.’
Antony Gormley in Villa Kast
The Kollegienkirche has been an important venue for the Salzburg Festival for more than 100 years. Max Reinhardt first used this unique Baroque church as a theatrical space in 1922, when he staged the world premiere of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s mystery play Das Salzburger große Welttheater (The Salzburg Great World Theatre). The Ouverture spirituelle, which in large parts takes place in the Kollegienkirche, has served as a reflective opening to the Salzburg Festival’s programming every year since 2012.
Antony Gormley in Gallery Thaddaeus Ropac
The Salzburg Festival and Thaddaeus Ropac would like to thank Christian Wallisch-Breitsching, the administrative director of the Kollegienkirche, for allowing us to exhibit Gormley’s sculptures here.
Antony Gormley in Gallery Thaddaeus Ropac
Antony Gormley (*1950) is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to 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 in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.
Gormley created New York Clearing for global art initiative Connect, BTS, which likened the look of the looping metal tubes to a “drawing in space”
Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at TAG Art Museum, Qingdao (2023); Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg (2022); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (2022); National Gallery Singapore, Singapore (2021); Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Sindelfingen (2021); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); Delos, Greece (2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2019); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (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 Brasilia (2012); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2012); The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Malmö Konsthall, Malmö (1993), and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (1989).
Antony Gormley – Asian Field, 2003/2022
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) and Chord (MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA). 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 he 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 photographed by Stephen White in his studio in London in March 2021. Photo: courtesy Antony Gormley
(After Press materials)
Marijan Zlobec