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Descriptif du lot
Executed in 2000, the present work stems from Antony Gormley’s celebrated series of Quantum Clouds. Begun the previous year, these works stand among his most intricate and arresting creations. The series builds upon the language of the Domains, also begun in 1999, which sought to capture the energy below the surface of the skin through matrices of thin steel bars. In the Quantum Clouds, however, Gormley goes further, continuing the branching connections further into outer space and abstracting the human form at the sculpture’s core. A prominent example—Gormley’s tallest sculpture to date—was commissioned for the North Meadow Sculpture Project on London’s Greenwich Peninsula to celebrate the turn of the millennium. Other works from the series are held in institutional collections including the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Denver Art Museum, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Koriyama Museum, SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen and the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Inspired in part by conversations with the quantum physicist Basil Hiley, the series questions the relationship between the body and the world around it. As Gormley explains, the works ask ‘whether the body is emerging from a chaotic energy field, or the field from the body.’ Unlike the Domains, which remained more closely tied to the human form, the Quantum Clouds blur the boundaries between the contours of the body and the invisible mass of energy that surrounds it. ‘The Domains allowed me to evoke the internal space of the body as a field, but are still bound by an invisible skin,’ notes Gormley: ‘I wanted to extend or ignore the skin.’ Branching into space, the present work loses all sense of solidity: form and material are held in perpetual flux. The ‘indeterminacy of the skin’, Gormley explains, also disrupts the relationship between viewer and artwork, demanding ‘active involvement of the projection and finding force in the eye of the beholder’ (A. Gormley, ‘Quantum Clouds 1999-2007’, artist’s website).
Recently the subject of his first US museum survey at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Gormley rose to prominence in the 1990s. He won the 1994 Turner Prize for his installation Field for the British Isles, and in 1998 produced the iconic Angel of the North. Borrowing principles from nature, architecture, geometry and physics, Gormley’s works challenge sculpture’s historical understanding of the body as a static edifice. Instead, he seeks to reimagine it as a place: a site of dynamic restlessness that is always moving and changing. The artist had first explored body casting during the previous decade, using himself as a model. While much of his early oeuvre involved wrapping the human frame in lead, the Domains and Quantum Clouds allowed light to infiltrate its core, fracturing its mass and animating it from the inside out. In the present work, the viewer is invited to reflect upon the space they occupy in the world: the forces that shape us, and the way we shape them.
Inspired in part by conversations with the quantum physicist Basil Hiley, the series questions the relationship between the body and the world around it. As Gormley explains, the works ask ‘whether the body is emerging from a chaotic energy field, or the field from the body.’ Unlike the Domains, which remained more closely tied to the human form, the Quantum Clouds blur the boundaries between the contours of the body and the invisible mass of energy that surrounds it. ‘The Domains allowed me to evoke the internal space of the body as a field, but are still bound by an invisible skin,’ notes Gormley: ‘I wanted to extend or ignore the skin.’ Branching into space, the present work loses all sense of solidity: form and material are held in perpetual flux. The ‘indeterminacy of the skin’, Gormley explains, also disrupts the relationship between viewer and artwork, demanding ‘active involvement of the projection and finding force in the eye of the beholder’ (A. Gormley, ‘Quantum Clouds 1999-2007’, artist’s website).
Recently the subject of his first US museum survey at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Gormley rose to prominence in the 1990s. He won the 1994 Turner Prize for his installation Field for the British Isles, and in 1998 produced the iconic Angel of the North. Borrowing principles from nature, architecture, geometry and physics, Gormley’s works challenge sculpture’s historical understanding of the body as a static edifice. Instead, he seeks to reimagine it as a place: a site of dynamic restlessness that is always moving and changing. The artist had first explored body casting during the previous decade, using himself as a model. While much of his early oeuvre involved wrapping the human frame in lead, the Domains and Quantum Clouds allowed light to infiltrate its core, fracturing its mass and animating it from the inside out. In the present work, the viewer is invited to reflect upon the space they occupy in the world: the forces that shape us, and the way we shape them.