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Lot Essay
ANTONY GORMLEY
DISCUSSES SHRIVE X (TWISTED)
This work is rare - standing at the interface between two discrete sculptural investigations : the ‘Blockwork’ and ‘Beamer’ series that both investigate different part to whole construction strategies. Shrive X Twisted involves the languages of both in its fabrication.
Long beams of the same section as the blocks extend the proportions of the elements of earlier blockworks. This helps to make cantilevers more extreme but is also an attempt to deconstruct mass. This is particularly in evidence at the core of this bodyform where, when viewed from the side, the work divides, separated by two beams seen end on.
Using beams allows for a more extreme form construction making a sculpture stronger and more precarious at the same time. The gaps between the blocks become more important and allow the body to be more porous: space to interrogate mass.
The tension in this work is between its vulnerability and its robustness, carried in the twist, the rupturing of the silhouette and the dark voids in the interior of the torso.
In treating the body as a provisional building, I interrogate the relationship between urban man and inner nature.
DISCUSSES SHRIVE X (TWISTED)
This work is rare - standing at the interface between two discrete sculptural investigations : the ‘Blockwork’ and ‘Beamer’ series that both investigate different part to whole construction strategies. Shrive X Twisted involves the languages of both in its fabrication.
Long beams of the same section as the blocks extend the proportions of the elements of earlier blockworks. This helps to make cantilevers more extreme but is also an attempt to deconstruct mass. This is particularly in evidence at the core of this bodyform where, when viewed from the side, the work divides, separated by two beams seen end on.
Using beams allows for a more extreme form construction making a sculpture stronger and more precarious at the same time. The gaps between the blocks become more important and allow the body to be more porous: space to interrogate mass.
The tension in this work is between its vulnerability and its robustness, carried in the twist, the rupturing of the silhouette and the dark voids in the interior of the torso.
In treating the body as a provisional building, I interrogate the relationship between urban man and inner nature.