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Lot Essay
Antony Gormley’s WRAP (2020) is a work from his celebrated ‘Cast Blockworks’ series. Based on 3D scans of the artist’s own body, these sculptures apply the rules of architecture and geometry to the human form, seeking to interrogate the relationship between the body and the built environment in which it exists. The present work’s stacked cast-iron blocks form a standing figure, knees gently bent, with arms wrapped around its shoulders. As Gormley has explained, ‘The “Cast Blockworks” re-describe body volume in Euclidean terms, replacing the discrete function-based structures of anatomy with architectonic volumes that use the dynamics of stacking, cantilever and balance to achieve a stable structure that is still dynamic. Increasingly, the blocks have become more robust, often extending beyond the skin in an attempt to evoke particular feelings and tensions. The challenge is to find a way to employ this architectonic language to provoke empathetic feeling in the urban-bound viewer’ (A. Gormley, artist’s website).
Begun in 2005, Gormley’s ‘Cast Blockworks’ evolved from the original series of ‘Blockworks’ that he had initiated previously. The early works used small blocks in tight, pixel-like configurations. As his investigations progressed, however, the artist began using progressively larger units, distilling the human body to a series of more abstract geometries. ‘The series started with the idea of building using physical pixels,’ he has said, ‘but the small blocks turned into ever bigger blocks and description gave way to the realisation that the way one block sat on top of another could carry the feeling of inhabiting a body. At this larger scale, what the blocks do to each other is the critical thing. When you are standing around and doing nothing in particular, it is nice to stack your arms on top of your head. Suddenly you are a sculpture: you can feel those weights and measures not as they can be depicted—but as they are’ (A. Gormley, artist’s website).
Despite using his own body as the basis for his work, Gormley maintains that his sculptures are not intended as self-portraits; rather, they seek to capture the human condition in universal terms. Life-size in scale, WRAP induces a startling sense of self-awareness, prompting the onlooker to reassess their own physicality. ‘You could say that each of them displaces a space where someone could really stand’, Gormley has said of his works. ‘This acknowledgement of the absent is very important and is what needs to be filled by the subjectivity of the viewer. So, I would say that the subject of my work does not arrive until the viewer is looking at it’ (A. Gormley, interview with D. Ozerkov in Antony Gormley: Still Standing, exh. cat. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg 2011, p. 59).
Begun in 2005, Gormley’s ‘Cast Blockworks’ evolved from the original series of ‘Blockworks’ that he had initiated previously. The early works used small blocks in tight, pixel-like configurations. As his investigations progressed, however, the artist began using progressively larger units, distilling the human body to a series of more abstract geometries. ‘The series started with the idea of building using physical pixels,’ he has said, ‘but the small blocks turned into ever bigger blocks and description gave way to the realisation that the way one block sat on top of another could carry the feeling of inhabiting a body. At this larger scale, what the blocks do to each other is the critical thing. When you are standing around and doing nothing in particular, it is nice to stack your arms on top of your head. Suddenly you are a sculpture: you can feel those weights and measures not as they can be depicted—but as they are’ (A. Gormley, artist’s website).
Despite using his own body as the basis for his work, Gormley maintains that his sculptures are not intended as self-portraits; rather, they seek to capture the human condition in universal terms. Life-size in scale, WRAP induces a startling sense of self-awareness, prompting the onlooker to reassess their own physicality. ‘You could say that each of them displaces a space where someone could really stand’, Gormley has said of his works. ‘This acknowledgement of the absent is very important and is what needs to be filled by the subjectivity of the viewer. So, I would say that the subject of my work does not arrive until the viewer is looking at it’ (A. Gormley, interview with D. Ozerkov in Antony Gormley: Still Standing, exh. cat. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg 2011, p. 59).