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Lot Essay
Made in 2013, STAVE II belongs to Antony Gormley’s series of Proppers. Standing almost two metres tall, the work is formed of cast iron blocks and beams that resolve into an architectonic body. Here, it becomes a looming and precarious high-rise tower, reflecting on the skyscrapers that increasingly make up our urbanised world.
Begun in 2010, Gormley’s Proppers extend the language of his earlier Blockworks and Beamers. Detailing the journey from Blockworks to Beamers to Proppers, Gormley explains how ‘the blocks started to be arranged according to the logic of architectural construction using stacking, propping and cantilever, allowing a greater dynamic of parts and greater liberty with the body-volumes.’ In 2009, the Blockworks evolved into the Beamers, ‘where beams, running in three axes, touch the body’s boundary and form an axial stack.’ The ‘propping’, he writes, ‘has evolved from trying to achieve the maximum difference of the beam section with the minimum number of elements, to make a stack of beams within the bounding condition of a human body’ (A. Gormley, ‘Proppers’, artist’s website.). The artist has long used his own form as a frame of reference, and here it transforms into a powerful interplay of solid shapes and empty voids, like a building divided into rooms. As light filters through its apertures, activating the space within and around it, we are invited to contemplate our own physical presence, and the sensation of inhabiting our body within the urban city.
In this way, Gormley uses the part/whole nature of constructed sculpture to foreground what it feels like to sense the weight of the body as a force, wishing to convey the inner feeling of the body carried by the mutual relations of the blocks, all whilst testing the ability of the piled blocks to stand. The Proppers experiment with, and continually shift, the gravitational ‘load path’ of the stack. They seek to make these relations between the body and architecture, stability and instability, visible: their geometric rigour is juxtaposed with a sense of playful liberation, calling to mind ‘the freedom of a child seeing how high his wooden blocks can reach’ (A. Gormley, ‘Proppers’, ibid.).
Begun in 2010, Gormley’s Proppers extend the language of his earlier Blockworks and Beamers. Detailing the journey from Blockworks to Beamers to Proppers, Gormley explains how ‘the blocks started to be arranged according to the logic of architectural construction using stacking, propping and cantilever, allowing a greater dynamic of parts and greater liberty with the body-volumes.’ In 2009, the Blockworks evolved into the Beamers, ‘where beams, running in three axes, touch the body’s boundary and form an axial stack.’ The ‘propping’, he writes, ‘has evolved from trying to achieve the maximum difference of the beam section with the minimum number of elements, to make a stack of beams within the bounding condition of a human body’ (A. Gormley, ‘Proppers’, artist’s website.). The artist has long used his own form as a frame of reference, and here it transforms into a powerful interplay of solid shapes and empty voids, like a building divided into rooms. As light filters through its apertures, activating the space within and around it, we are invited to contemplate our own physical presence, and the sensation of inhabiting our body within the urban city.
In this way, Gormley uses the part/whole nature of constructed sculpture to foreground what it feels like to sense the weight of the body as a force, wishing to convey the inner feeling of the body carried by the mutual relations of the blocks, all whilst testing the ability of the piled blocks to stand. The Proppers experiment with, and continually shift, the gravitational ‘load path’ of the stack. They seek to make these relations between the body and architecture, stability and instability, visible: their geometric rigour is juxtaposed with a sense of playful liberation, calling to mind ‘the freedom of a child seeing how high his wooden blocks can reach’ (A. Gormley, ‘Proppers’, ibid.).