Antony Gormley: Mind @ Galleria Salvatore + Caroline Ala

The work is a point between origin and becoming. Like a seed, between death and the new life there is a point of stasis and silence, a time for reflection. Sculpture can use that time.”Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley, Country, 1981

The Galleria Salvatore + Caroline Ala is pleased to announce the opening of the English sculptor Antony Gormley’s one-man exhibition entited Mind which will take place on Wednesday evening, April 22nd, between the hours of 6 and 9 pm. The exhibition will continue through Thursday, May 28th 2009.

With a distance of eighteen years’ time since the last exhibition at the Salvatore Ala Gallery in New York and twenty-four since his last show here in Milan, the Gallery has selected to exhibit five of the artist’s lead sculptures realised in 1982 and 1984 together with forty-eight works on paper dating from the 1980’s. During this period of his career, the sculptor used his own body for the mould from which a plaster cast was made, later reinforced by fiberglass and covered in lead.

The English critic, Sandy Nairne, in his text published in the catalogue accompanying Gormley’s 1985 exhibition at the Städtische Galerie of Regensburg writes: “Each sculpture invites occupation. It is complete when, as Gormley puts it, they are ’inhabited’ like a building can be inhabited, but by the imagination or the mind. This ’invasion’ of the sculpture, or identification by the spectator however applies to all of Gormley’s hollow figures.“

Antony Gormley, Mind, 1984

“When Gormley made Mind, a fourteen by nine foot lead ’cloud’, hung from the ceiling, he made the ultimate dream object. An absurd reversal of weightlessness, ominous in its overhead presence, it follows no ’laws’ of sculpture and bears only the most schematic relationship to its counterpart in the skies. Like the lead-skinned figures it invites imaginative invasion.“

Nairne further observes: “The Beginning, The Middle, The End gives no indication as to which part is which, but the expectation of narrative is strong. Not narrative as story-telling, but narrative just as connected events. The terracotta figure looks backward, against the forward step of the lead figure that supports it. The long shadow, falling ahead, implies a place on the earth. Many connections can be made, but perhaps the strongest suggestion is that the terracotta figure is the conscience or the memory of the larger figure, certainly a weight on its mind. The title comes from a saying of Aristotle [Poetics], and this puzzle demands more of the viewer than the previous singular encounter.“

Antony Gormley, The Beginning, The Middle, The End, 1983-1984

Antony Gormley born in London, 1950. To mention a few of his principal one-man exhibitions in prominent galleries and museums: British Museum, Tate Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), Galleria Salvatore Ala (New York/Milano), Louisiana Museum (Denmark), Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Contemporary Art Museum, Sapporo (Japan).

The artist participated in the Venice Biennale “Aperto” 1982 and “Art and Alchemy”1986 and Documento 8 in 1987. His installation entitled Field travelled to several museum venues in the US and Canada.. His large scale works Angel of the North and Quantum Cloud are among the most celebrated examples of contemporary British outdoor sculpture installations.

The artist was awarded The Turner Prize in 1994 and The South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, and was made an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1997. Antony Gormley lives and works in London.

Apr 23 - May 28, 2009. Galleria Salvatore + Caroline Ala. Envoyer un email