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Lot Essay
Medium (1994) is a sculpture from Antony Gormley’s series of lead body-case works. It takes the form of a standing human figure with its hands held to the ears. To create the work, sheets of lead were beaten around a mould taken from the artist’s own body and joined along strict horizontal and vertical lines. Solder seams mark the sculpture’s surface, mapping the body like axes on a coordinate plane. Gormley began working with lead during the 1970s, and used the material to make his earliest body-cases in the 1980s. Medium belongs to a later phase of this group of works, which he sought to make ‘more hermetic and enclosed, with greater internal pressure’ (A. Gormley, quoted on the artist’s website). Where some previous lead sculptures were pierced, with small openings at the ears or elsewhere, Medium makes a gesture that implies a sealing off from the outside world.
Medium is indicative of a foundational body of work initiated in the 1980s, for which Gormley began moulding his body in plaster. This intimate and often uncomfortable process required the artist to be completely still as he was wrapped in clingfilm and plaster-soaked scrim. The plaster would then harden and form an indexical record of Gormley’s body. Finally, at the end of this hours-long process, he would be cut out of the mould and released back into the world. ‘It requires a moment of stillness, of concentration’, he said. ‘I am trying to make sculpture from the inside, by using my body as the instrument and the material’ (A. Gormley quoted in R. Bevan, ‘Learning To See: An Interview With Antony Gormley’, 1993, reproduced on the artist’s website). Gormley then strengthened the mould with fibreglass, around which he beat sheets of lead.
Gormley chose lead both for its malleability and as a substance laden with symbolic weight. It is associated variously with protection, toxicity and alchemical change. These complexities mirror aspects of human experience. ‘You could say lead is a hybrid, paradoxical material,’ he says, ‘and there was something about its density and melancholy that attracted me, but it simultaneously carries a promise of transformation’ (A. Gormley in conversation with L. Pietroiusti, in Witness: Early Lead Works, exh. cat. White Cube, London, 2025, p. 103). The space inside the body-cases is also significant. Gormley has compared their interior darkness—like that we experience when we close our eyes—to the expansive darkness of the universe. If Medium carries a sense of introspection, shutting away external information with its covered ears, it also implies an unknown world within. ‘Much of human life is hidden’, wrote Gormley in 1985. ‘Sculpture, in stillness, can transmit what may not be seen. My work is to make bodies into vessels that both contain and occupy space. Space exists outside the door and inside the head’ (A. Gormley, ‘Artist Notes, 1985’, in ibid., p. 75).
Medium is indicative of a foundational body of work initiated in the 1980s, for which Gormley began moulding his body in plaster. This intimate and often uncomfortable process required the artist to be completely still as he was wrapped in clingfilm and plaster-soaked scrim. The plaster would then harden and form an indexical record of Gormley’s body. Finally, at the end of this hours-long process, he would be cut out of the mould and released back into the world. ‘It requires a moment of stillness, of concentration’, he said. ‘I am trying to make sculpture from the inside, by using my body as the instrument and the material’ (A. Gormley quoted in R. Bevan, ‘Learning To See: An Interview With Antony Gormley’, 1993, reproduced on the artist’s website). Gormley then strengthened the mould with fibreglass, around which he beat sheets of lead.
Gormley chose lead both for its malleability and as a substance laden with symbolic weight. It is associated variously with protection, toxicity and alchemical change. These complexities mirror aspects of human experience. ‘You could say lead is a hybrid, paradoxical material,’ he says, ‘and there was something about its density and melancholy that attracted me, but it simultaneously carries a promise of transformation’ (A. Gormley in conversation with L. Pietroiusti, in Witness: Early Lead Works, exh. cat. White Cube, London, 2025, p. 103). The space inside the body-cases is also significant. Gormley has compared their interior darkness—like that we experience when we close our eyes—to the expansive darkness of the universe. If Medium carries a sense of introspection, shutting away external information with its covered ears, it also implies an unknown world within. ‘Much of human life is hidden’, wrote Gormley in 1985. ‘Sculpture, in stillness, can transmit what may not be seen. My work is to make bodies into vessels that both contain and occupy space. Space exists outside the door and inside the head’ (A. Gormley, ‘Artist Notes, 1985’, in ibid., p. 75).