Antony Gormley (B. 1950)
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Antony Gormley (B. 1950)

STRETCH

Details
Antony Gormley (B. 1950)
STRETCH
cast iron
11 ¾ x 77 ½ x 36 ¼in. (30 x 197 x 92cm.)
Executed in 2015
Provenance
Galleria Continua, San Gimignano.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2016.
Exhibited
Florence, Forte di Belvedere, Human Antony Gormley, 2015, p. 171 (installation view illustrated in colour, pp. 160-161 and 163).
Beirut, Metropolitan Art Society, Wind and Art Don’t care about border, 2015-2016.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. These lots have been imported from outside the EU or, if the UK has withdrawn from the EU without an agreed transition deal, from outside of the UK for sale and placed under the Temporary Admission regime. Import VAT is payable at 5% on the hammer price. VAT at 20% will be added to the buyer’s premium but will not be shown separately on our invoice.

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Tessa Lord
Tessa Lord

Lot Essay

Lying prone and outstretched Stretch evokes a feeling of arrested internal movement and acute tension.

An important work from Antony Gormley’s acclaimed exhibition, Human, which was presented at the Forte Di Belvedere in Florence in 2015, Stretch is an exceptional example of the artist’s Cube Works series (2012 - 2018). Intrigued by the ways in which iron pyrite naturally aggregates, the artist began to experiment by using offset cubes to create body masses. The aim was to translate the volumes of the body into strict cubic frames or solids, using a sculptural language borrowed from geology to replace anatomy.

Having its basis in the rational logic of geometry, in the 20th century the cube became the basis of modernist construction and the minimalist unit. In contrast to these conventions Gormley uses it here to evoke strong emotion and bring the viewer back to the body. This work is powerful proof of the artist's claim that as his ‘work becomes more abstract it engages our empathy more completely'.

Implying a dialogue between human nature and planetary matter this lifesize work is cast in iron, an earth material found at the core of the planet and which when exposed at its surface reacts to time and the elements, fusing both into the meaning and material of the sculpture.

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