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Lot Essay
'My work is to make bodies into vessels that both contain and occupy space. Space exists outside the door and inside my head. My work is to make a human space in space'
(A. Gormley, quoted in 'Notes by the Artist', Antony Gormley: Five Works, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London 1987, n.p.).
'I started working with lead because it was a material that could be easily moulded and constructed in the studio by beating and soldering. All the first lead works involved covering and uncovering, insulating and revealing found objects, either closed forms like stones or open forms like bowls and shields'
(A. Gormley, as quoted by E. H. Gombrich, 'E.H. Gombrich in conversation with Antony Gormley', Antony Gormley, Serpentine Gallery, London 1995, p. 10).
Lying supine on the ground, arms outstretched towards the heavens, Reach is one of Antony Gormley's earliest bodycase sculptures in lead. As with much of his later work from the body, the making starts with a lived moment of embodied time captured as an indexical trace. Foregoing expressionism or illustration, Gormley's radical exploration of 'being in the body' eschews traditional representation in favour of the presentation of forensic evidence. Executed in 1983-1984, Gormley had only begun to explore the phenomenology of the body the preceding year, perceiving it as an axis of physical and spatial experience. Instantly recognisable, the human form Reach has become synonymous with Gormley's uvre, forming an important precursor to Gormley's subsequent representations of the human form, informing such works as the artist's masterpiece, Angel of the North (1996).
Reach was moulded from the artist's own body, the lead bodycase divided by vertical and horizontal solder lines that map a hermetic carapace covering the plaster mould inside. At once industrial and organic, lead has consistently been a privileged medium for Gormley, its malleability lended itself to the artist's instinctual practice. Speaking of this practice the artist has stated, 'I started working with lead because it was a material that could be easily moulded and constructed in the studio by beating and soldering. All the first lead work involved covering and uncovering, insulating and revealing found objects, either closed forms like stones or open forms like bowls and shields. I was very interested in using scraps and pieces fitted very closely together as a kind of jigsaw puzzle to make entities or complete forms' (A. Gormley, quoted in 'First Lead Works 1978-1984' [www.antonygormley.com]). In Reach this new lead surface is pierced by two holes at the eyes allowing the dark void contained within the sculpture to connect with the infinity of space. The horizontal nature of the sculpture addresses the relationship between the skin of the body and the skin of the earth.
In its stillness and life-size scale, the leaden carapace ofReach can be seen as a self-referential reflection inwards. It evokes the contemplative stillness of a body in a pose of mediation, supremely aware of its existential presence through its physicality in space. A 'vehicle of feeling' and impregnated with the artist's pathos, Reach appears not as a sculpture, but as a being; inviting the viewer to pose questions about their place in the world. As the artist explains, 'I am now trying to deal with what it is like to be a human being. To make an image that in some ways come close to my state of mind. My body is my closest experience of matter... I want to recapture for sculpture an area of human experience which has been hidden for a while. It is to do with very simple things - what it feels like to look out and see, what it feels like to be absolutely quiet and just aware of the passage of air around your body' (A. Gormley, quoted in L. Cooke, Antony Gormley, Salvatore Ala Gallery, Milan and New York, 1984, reproduced https://www.antonygormley.com/resources/essay-item/id/96). In creating sculpture to fulfill this ambition, Gormley reconnects with a type of existentialism and spiritualism rarely engaged within contemporary art.
(A. Gormley, quoted in 'Notes by the Artist', Antony Gormley: Five Works, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London 1987, n.p.).
'I started working with lead because it was a material that could be easily moulded and constructed in the studio by beating and soldering. All the first lead works involved covering and uncovering, insulating and revealing found objects, either closed forms like stones or open forms like bowls and shields'
(A. Gormley, as quoted by E. H. Gombrich, 'E.H. Gombrich in conversation with Antony Gormley', Antony Gormley, Serpentine Gallery, London 1995, p. 10).
Lying supine on the ground, arms outstretched towards the heavens, Reach is one of Antony Gormley's earliest bodycase sculptures in lead. As with much of his later work from the body, the making starts with a lived moment of embodied time captured as an indexical trace. Foregoing expressionism or illustration, Gormley's radical exploration of 'being in the body' eschews traditional representation in favour of the presentation of forensic evidence. Executed in 1983-1984, Gormley had only begun to explore the phenomenology of the body the preceding year, perceiving it as an axis of physical and spatial experience. Instantly recognisable, the human form Reach has become synonymous with Gormley's uvre, forming an important precursor to Gormley's subsequent representations of the human form, informing such works as the artist's masterpiece, Angel of the North (1996).
Reach was moulded from the artist's own body, the lead bodycase divided by vertical and horizontal solder lines that map a hermetic carapace covering the plaster mould inside. At once industrial and organic, lead has consistently been a privileged medium for Gormley, its malleability lended itself to the artist's instinctual practice. Speaking of this practice the artist has stated, 'I started working with lead because it was a material that could be easily moulded and constructed in the studio by beating and soldering. All the first lead work involved covering and uncovering, insulating and revealing found objects, either closed forms like stones or open forms like bowls and shields. I was very interested in using scraps and pieces fitted very closely together as a kind of jigsaw puzzle to make entities or complete forms' (A. Gormley, quoted in 'First Lead Works 1978-1984' [www.antonygormley.com]). In Reach this new lead surface is pierced by two holes at the eyes allowing the dark void contained within the sculpture to connect with the infinity of space. The horizontal nature of the sculpture addresses the relationship between the skin of the body and the skin of the earth.
In its stillness and life-size scale, the leaden carapace ofReach can be seen as a self-referential reflection inwards. It evokes the contemplative stillness of a body in a pose of mediation, supremely aware of its existential presence through its physicality in space. A 'vehicle of feeling' and impregnated with the artist's pathos, Reach appears not as a sculpture, but as a being; inviting the viewer to pose questions about their place in the world. As the artist explains, 'I am now trying to deal with what it is like to be a human being. To make an image that in some ways come close to my state of mind. My body is my closest experience of matter... I want to recapture for sculpture an area of human experience which has been hidden for a while. It is to do with very simple things - what it feels like to look out and see, what it feels like to be absolutely quiet and just aware of the passage of air around your body' (A. Gormley, quoted in L. Cooke, Antony Gormley, Salvatore Ala Gallery, Milan and New York, 1984, reproduced https://www.antonygormley.com/resources/essay-item/id/96). In creating sculpture to fulfill this ambition, Gormley reconnects with a type of existentialism and spiritualism rarely engaged within contemporary art.