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Lot Essay
'The Insider suggests that the intimate is the most strange, that inside each of us is a self that we would maybe rather not recognise, and which constitutes a third kind of man, the Insider as alien witness'
(A. Gormley, quoted in "Insiders 1999", J. Hutchinson, E.H. Gombrich, E.H., L.B. Njatin (eds.), Antony Gormley, Phaidon Press, London, 1995, p. 160).
Inspired by the reduction of the iconic Angel of the North Gormley, whose main concern lies with the body and its boundaries, distilled the essence of a lived life in the Insider II. The free standing emaciated sculpture has been conceived through the radical mathematical reduction of the artist's body mass resulting in a shrunken highly concentrated form thereby revealing the core that lies within. 'Insider II is one of a series of fourteen sculptures made between 1996 and 1999 which began as an experiment into the concentration of the human body. They are all 2/3 reductions of my body, apart from the last 4 in which I used the bodies of 3 female models, and a work based on my first child when just able to stand. The reductions are achieved by hand, by cutting around 130 cross-sections through the body mould, reducing all of the through measurement and then replacing the reduced cross-sections with the mould and welding them together so that they keep their place precisely at the centre of the form. The only designed parts are the bridges between the torso, links at the hips and shoulders, and between the chest and the breasts or the hips and the penis' (ibid.,p. 160-161).
Cast in iron, the base element found at the earth's core, Gormley likens the sculptures to the cooled and revealed magnetic load cores of the body. Gormley describes the figures as being 'to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is a core rather than a skeleton' (ibid., p. 160-161.).
(A. Gormley, quoted in "Insiders 1999", J. Hutchinson, E.H. Gombrich, E.H., L.B. Njatin (eds.), Antony Gormley, Phaidon Press, London, 1995, p. 160).
Inspired by the reduction of the iconic Angel of the North Gormley, whose main concern lies with the body and its boundaries, distilled the essence of a lived life in the Insider II. The free standing emaciated sculpture has been conceived through the radical mathematical reduction of the artist's body mass resulting in a shrunken highly concentrated form thereby revealing the core that lies within. 'Insider II is one of a series of fourteen sculptures made between 1996 and 1999 which began as an experiment into the concentration of the human body. They are all 2/3 reductions of my body, apart from the last 4 in which I used the bodies of 3 female models, and a work based on my first child when just able to stand. The reductions are achieved by hand, by cutting around 130 cross-sections through the body mould, reducing all of the through measurement and then replacing the reduced cross-sections with the mould and welding them together so that they keep their place precisely at the centre of the form. The only designed parts are the bridges between the torso, links at the hips and shoulders, and between the chest and the breasts or the hips and the penis' (ibid.,p. 160-161).
Cast in iron, the base element found at the earth's core, Gormley likens the sculptures to the cooled and revealed magnetic load cores of the body. Gormley describes the figures as being 'to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is a core rather than a skeleton' (ibid., p. 160-161.).