Small Console III

Antony Gormley’s Small Console III, 2013, is part of the artist’s celebrated Cast Blockworks series, for which he applies an architectural rigour to the human form. Gormley, the subject of last year’s critically acclaimed solo exhibition at London’s Royal Academy, is deeply invested in the relationship between a body and the space in which it moves and exists. In Small Console III, a succession of stacked iron cubes produces an interlocking structure suggestive of an upright human figure. Begun in 2005, the series grew out of the artist’s earlier Blockworks, for which he assembled small blocks into ‘physical pixelisations’ (A. Gormley, quoted in BLOCKWORKS, 2003 – 2018). Over time, he progressed to larger and larger blocks, and in his renderings of the body as an abstract form, Gormley seeks a universality of experience and image. As critic Skye Sherwin describes, ‘Faceless or expressionless Gormley’s figures may be, but their blankness is also an invitation to identify, appealing to our own experiences of the body, inner life and mortality’ (S. Sherwin, ‘Antony Gormley review’, The Guardian, 16 September 2019). Forging an empathetic encounter between viewer and sculpture, Gormley invites self-reflection, situating his investigations within the long lineage of sculptural history: ‘If we take the standing stone as the sort of ‘Ur-sculpture’, which I think it is, it is the ultimate witness of time and space and an attempt to mark the surfaces of the world with some indicator of the conscious mind’ (A. Gormley, quoted in M. Iversen, ‘Still Standing’, Antony Gormley: Still Standing, exh. cat., The Hermitage State Museum, St Petersburg, 2011, p. 50).