Yesterday, Linda and i walked the dogs at the surroundings of Museum Voorlinden and because this was our second visit in a month we immediately noticed the sculptures by Anton y Gormley. Many of the dutch people know his “EXPOSURE (2010)”, but never realize is was made by Gormley.
Now the Museum Voorlinden has organized and outside exhibition. Gormley scattered around 30 of his human sculptures over the entire estate. Around the museum, in the park, in the dunes and even in a small river.
The best is that these sculptures enhance the magic of the museum and one would wish these were acquired for their collection. The best is that the visitors can interact with the sculptures. They are frozen but because of this interaction, they become alive.
here is the text Museum Voorlinden has published on their site on this highly recommended exhibition
Gormley approaches the age-old subject of the human body in his own unique, yet universal and philosophical way, building on art history and conceptual sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s. GROUND will be one of the most ambitious exhibitions in the museum’s history, the first to occupy both the museum and the estate of Voorlinden. ‘As a museum, we want to do everything we can to offer Antony Gormley the stage he deserves’, says director Suzanne Swarts.
Antony Gormley: ‘Sculpture is no longer a medium of memorial and idealisation but a context in which human being can be examined. Sculpture is no longer representational: it is an instrument of investigation and questioning. I have called this exhibition GROUND to make this open invitation of sculpture clear. Without the viewer there is no show, without the gallery there is no context. The joy of this kind of exhibition is to allow the richness of the context itself to become activated by sculpture. For me, the body of the viewer is often the activating principle in a ‘ground’ of contemplation: the works become catalysts for awareness and grounds for physical and imaginative inhabitation.’
Groundbreaking works
The exhibition includes Passage, a 12-metre-long steel work on display for the first time in the Netherlands. Inside the sculpture, one travels through darkness into the unknown. The expansive work Breathing Room, in which you can experience standing in a three-dimensional drawing in the space, will also be shown. Extending outside, Critical Mass puts sculpture in dialogue with the museum’s extensive grounds: 60 solid cast iron bodyforms will be placed in relation with the trees, lawns, canals and reedbeds of the park. Gormley sees these ‘capturings’ of basic body positions as ‘industrially made fossils dropped into the Voorlinden’s verdant context, calling on embedded body-memory and our potential for feeling’.
Director Suzanne Swarts: ‘Antony is one of those rare artists who has built up a timeless oeuvre with a universal visual language, yet very own signature. For four decades, he has been making sculptures that are dear to people from all over the world. For him, sculpture and the human body are the starting point for an endless cosmological investigation that concerns, touches and encourages us all to reflect.’
http://www.ftn-books.com has some still some great titles on Gormley available.
