His towering figures have made him the UK’s most famous sculptor. Now, in two new works, the artist is reckoning with the very essence of time and space
Antony Gormley has hurt his knee, which is a pain in more ways than one. He’s due in Italy in a few days’ time, to install the second of two new shows, and time is too short to be hopping around on crutches. His office is up a flight of external stairs, which are made of metal and get slippery in the rain, so he won’t be coming down again today. Though his assistant apologises that the huge warehouse studio complex downstairs is empty, it doesn’t appear so. Large metal figures, wrapped in plastic, hang from the beams like giant, conceptual bats. In a side room, specialist packers are constructing crates round other pieces, which are about to be shipped off here, there and everywhere. Outside, a couple of cast-iron figures stand in the drizzle, gathering the rust that will be part of their personality when they are sent out into the world. Isn’t there a risk they’ll get stolen? Gormley laughs, and points out that thieves would have to come with some serious heavy-lifting equipment.
The two shows, in Venice and in the Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano, will display the little and large of one of the UK’s most industrious sculptors, a knight of the realm, who is beloved for such towering public works as the Angel of the North at Gateshead and Another Place, the 100 figures that have stood on Crosby beach in Merseyside since 2005. But those who feel they know him, because they have been seeing works based on casts of his own lean body for so many decades, may find themselves perplexed by a new body of work that is altogether more theoretical.
