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Lot Essay
Gauge II proposes, in architectural language, a measuring of human experience. The work references a classical contrapposto pose but with subtle humour, which counters the implicit sexual allure of a classical nude with hard geometry. With its loose association of volumes, this work has a simple grace. The sculpture continues Gormley’s use of the abstract languages of modernism to make works that engage human emotion while critically appraising the function of sculpture.
The ‘framer’ group of works that Gauge II belongs to are constituted by slender open box frames. It is as if Gormley was returning to the spatiality of his installation Breathing Room I (2006), that ‘uses the idea of architecture, transforming it into body-structures in a virtual way’, and offers the moving viewer a series of constantly changing perspectives. Some of the ‘framers’ are made with such thin pieces of steel that they seem less linked to a corporeal referent than to the way scaffolding draws around a building, giving it a feeling both tentative and vulnerable.
See Pierre Tillet, ‘Sentinels’, in For the Time Being, Paris and Salzburg: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 2011.
The ‘framer’ group of works that Gauge II belongs to are constituted by slender open box frames. It is as if Gormley was returning to the spatiality of his installation Breathing Room I (2006), that ‘uses the idea of architecture, transforming it into body-structures in a virtual way’, and offers the moving viewer a series of constantly changing perspectives. Some of the ‘framers’ are made with such thin pieces of steel that they seem less linked to a corporeal referent than to the way scaffolding draws around a building, giving it a feeling both tentative and vulnerable.
See Pierre Tillet, ‘Sentinels’, in For the Time Being, Paris and Salzburg: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 2011.