A Universe Unfolds with Antony Gormley at White Cube

“The only place where we can find true freedom is within the infinite darkness of the body, once the body is still,” reflects Sir Antony Gormley — whose lifelong enquiry into the condition of embodiment has redefined the very ontology of sculpture. Since the mid-1970s, Gormley has forged a language of form that moves beyond representation, proposing sculpture as a vessel for awareness — a witness to being, space, and time.

Far from idealizing the body, Gormley returns to it as a site of exchange: porous, vulnerable, and continuous with the world. His sculptures are not images, but thresholds — material invitations to presence that hold the tension between gravity and grace, silence and attention, interiority and extension. From Another Place to Event Horizon, these figures do not describe the human; they invite us to inhabit it.

Antony Gormley’s Early Work on View at White Cube

His latest exhibition, “WITNESS: Early Lead Works,” at White Cube Mason’s Yard, revisits the crucible of his sculptural thinking. Spanning the late 1970s to early 1990s, these works emerged in the shadow of the Cold War and reflect a convergence of material experimentation, spiritual enquiry, and existential urgency. Here, the foundational coordinates of his practice take shape: stillness as intensity, containment as invocation, and the body as a zone of immanence — not a figure to be seen, but a space to be sensed.

Lead — dense, mutable, and alchemical — is more than medium; it is metaphor and membrane, both concealment and preservation. In Land, Sea and Air I (1977–79), elemental materials are sealed within lead, removed from view yet rendered more viscerally present. This gesture, as Gormley describes, transposes matter into mind — making the invisible intimate, and turning absence into a site of resonance. Across the exhibition, the sculptural field unfolds into a quiet cosmology: the body becomes a chamber, a conduit, a planetary trace — linking the inner darkness of being to the unseen order that shapes the stars.

Gormley spoke with lucid humility to Whitewall about the paradoxes that animate his work — protection and exposure, solitude and relation, presence and precarity. What emerges is not a statement but a sustained enquiry: into what sculpture can witness, how it might offer a space for being, and how — in an age of distraction and disembodiment — it might quietly reawaken our capacity for inward attention.

These early lead works do not declare, narrate, or perform. They wait — silent, sealed, and luminous — asking only that we stop, be still, and return to the body as the first place of knowing.

WHITEWALL (ANA NOVI): Lead recurs in your early works as a container of transformation. What drew you to this substance at the time, and how did it enable the shift you’ve described as “from matter to mind?”

 
ANTONY GORMLEY: Lead is an extraordinary material. It’s paradoxical: inert and insulating, yet capable of taking and holding form. It’s malleable, but has all the resistance we associate with metal. Part of its appeal was the physical engagement — that I could do the work myself. I felt I could make things more present by removing them from sight, giving them a new skin — a veil that protects from time, but also retains form.

To make a lead cover, you have to encourage the material. You take a sheet, cut it roughly to shape. If I was doing a head, I’d use four elliptical sheets, laying one over a quarter of the surface — say, from the nose to the ear. Using a boxwood mallet oiled with linseed, I’d create an upstand — a wall at 90 degrees — and beat against it, allowing the lead to slowly stretch. It’s a slow process, like carving: a steady rhythm that allows form to arise between mass and sheet. It’s meditative.

When flat, the sheet folds easily. But as soon as it gains compound curvature, it stiffens. This paradox — malleability, yet memory — is part of lead’s ability to translate matter into mind.

Land, Sea and Air is the first work in the show. I made it at the Slade, after returning from Ireland with a granite stone — shaped by time and the sea, asking to be lifted, held. I didn’t know why, but I picked it up near Clifton in Connemara and brought it home. I sealed it in lead — an act of respect. It sat in my studio for a year before I understood what I’d done. The rock had been removed from sight, but remained present — inviting the imagination. Object and referent united. That was the beginning of understanding how lead could transform the physical into the imagined.

Then I cut the lead skin off. I had the stone and the two halves of its case. I realised I could create a work that paid wider respect: to the three elements life comes from — land, sea, and air.

The Root of the Sculptor’s Practice

In the exhibition, it’s the first piece you see — the root of my practice. I remember not sleeping the night I finished the three identical elements, all beaten from the same stone. Each one held a different element. The stone is heavy — you feel its presence even when you can’t see it. Air is lightest, sea in between. But you don’t lift them. The stone stays grounded — cloned and calling for attention.

Sculpture has often been about imposing an ideal form onto raw material. I wanted something else. By selecting, displacing, and insulating a stone shaped over time, I placed it into stasis — a relic inviting contemplation. The work honours the elements as life’s foundation. They’ve been lifted out of time, held in suspension, waiting for our attention.

“Sculpture has often been about imposing an ideal form onto raw material. I wanted something else,”

—Antony Gormley

This work is the seed of all that came later with the body. It’s also an act of hope for life’s continuance. Think of its context: the Cold War. The greatest threat was nuclear annihilation — the chaos of our irresponsible techne. In today’s world of identity politics, nationalism, and rearmament, the work still speaks. But then, the danger was clearer: nuclear holocaust.

Now, we’re aware — but continue to avoid the truth. The real emergency is our continued use of fossil fuels, threatening the biosphere. We must recognise our utter dependence on this living skin of the planet. Sorry — that was a long reply to a question really about lead.

WW: That was an extraordinary answer — thank you. You’ve anticipated two of my questions and touched on a third, which I deeply appreciate.

These works emerged under the long shadow of the Cold War — a time marked by threat, containment, and silence. How did that context shape your approach to stillness, protection, and the body as both exposed and enclosed?

AG: These are very big questions. For much of Europe or the West, the history of the body in sculpture has been at the service of power — statues of rulers or mythological beings as embodiments of authority. (I’ve just come back from Greece, where ancient and modern statues of Apollo, Aphrodite, and Athena abound.) My challenge was to approach the body in sculpture not as an idealised object seen at a distance, but as a place to be encountered and experienced internally.

Whether we’re talking about Phidias or Rodin, the artist/model trope has long dominated Western art. The highest challenge was to produce a believable body, verified objectively and seen from afar. Consider Bernini’s two portraits of Scipione Borghese — masterpieces in capturing the living presence of a man. His mouth open — you can almost sense his breath. Or Michelangelo’s idealised figures — the Pietà, the David. But that task of reproducing the body based on observation, whether from life or from art, to create an idealised image — that’s not my interest.

“My challenge was to approach the body in sculpture not as an idealised object seen at a distance, but as a place to be encountered and experienced internally,”

— Antony Gormley

The show at White Cube begins with works grounded in objects. One is Shield II — a convex mirror covered in lead, soldered from small pieces. It denies the mirror’s power to reflect our appearance in favour of something else: an acknowledgment that we live on the other side of appearance. My work recognises the body not as an object, but as a place — to be felt from within rather than seen from without.

This is another paradox. Genetically and through nurture, we think of ourselves as individuals — unique, particular. But if we close our eyes, we’re in a space without objects, without limit, with the potential for infinite extension. That immanence is gifted to us through the body. The darkness within is immediate, available. It has long been linked to the sublime — to sunyata, to the void. It opposes the constructed identity of the individual. That’s what I’m interested in: can we relate to the body not as an identity, but as a vessel for the incommensurable, the unnamable, the ineffable?

The logical conclusion of my experiments with found objects or body extensions was that I had to use my own existence to examine existence. That wouldn’t have been possible without Vipassana training. As with the stone in Land, Sea and Air, I wanted to use my own body — to declare it a found object, the one part of the material world I happened to inhabit. In doing so, I could reject the artist/model trope and the Western tradition of the perfected copy, and offer something else.

Antony Gormley Takes Sculpture Away from Narrative

I want to take sculpture away from narrative — there’s no story except the one you, the viewer, bring to it. Sculpture accepts its essential conditions: stillness, silence, and lack. The idea of a freeze-frame from a marble movie is absurd. Take Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne — the moment Daphne becomes a tree. A freeze-frame that denies the materiality of calcium carbonate and the temporal nature of stone. Sculpture always returns to the slow time of stone — a place for inscribing fugitive human experience. Maybe I’m wrong — maybe that’s exactly what Bernini’s sculpture does, but in a very different way from mine.

I return to the standing stone as the Ur sculpture. What is it? A piece of the earth’s body brought to the surface and made to stand — a marker in space that calls on our time. It asks us to register that place, and our own mortality. That’s what I hope for my work. When I place one of my massive iron figures — which I think of as materialisations of the space once inside the lead-case works — into everyday life, what am I doing?

Think of the figure on Waterloo Bridge from Event Horizon. It registers a human moment of lived time, materialised as mineral, placed among the living as they cross the Thames. It invites confrontation with the demands of our urban, obligation-filled world — all that striving and goal-orientation.

Here is this thing — still, silent — its meaning open, but speaking of another kind of being. A body rooted to the spot — night and day, in sunshine, in rain — immersed in the elements. Like a standing stone, it asks you to reflect on time and place. Think of the Standing Stones of Stenness or the Heel Stone at Stonehenge. They orient you to a cosmic context — to the bodies in space that illuminate the night sky.

That’s what sculpture can do. But in its institutionalised or commodified state, we often can’t access that. Once placed on a mountain, a beach, or a roadside — that potential is released. It invites us to reflect on our own existence.

The placing of sculpture in space — and its ability to speak to your time — are connected.

At the core of my work is a desire to understand human vulnerability, to pay attention to our precarity — the fact that we are beings who will die. And that, maybe, is more important than the stories of imagined selfhood that make us watch White Lotus.

WW: It’s enlightening to hear how historical and sociopolitical forces shaped these works.

If I may, I’d like to turn to spirituality. From Milarepa to Jacob’s ladder, your work draws on traditions that embrace stillness as a mode of perception. How do practices like listening, receptivity, or surrender inform your understanding of sculpture as witness?

AG: In all traditions, there’s an acknowledgment of the need to stand apart — whether it’s Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, or Milarepa in the Tibetan Kagyu lineage, or the Taoist texts of Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu.

On one hand, we must celebrate — take energy and strength from our families, friends, and communities. But to gain understanding, you have to withdraw. Solitude is necessary soul food — and that’s the life of the artist I’m drawn to.

I’m speaking to you now from the drawing studio. The studio has become a community — people who think through making. But the place where I spend most of my time is here — where I withdraw from the fellowship of my co-workers.

Contemplation is the condition out of which art arises. And art, particularly sculpture, can only emerge from the stillness and silence inherent to it. The contemplative state has nothing to do with achievement; it’s closer to play, to meditation.

It’s curious — the evolution of our species’ technology has been so rapid, distracting, and overwhelming that this call to first-hand experience has become urgent. The transformations between matter and consciousness remain available to us — if we step aside from the determinants of persona and identity offered by a digitised culture grounded in material acquisition.

Everyone is understandably concerned with how they look — with how they are perceived by others. We need our friends to tell us when we’re looking good, or when we’re behaving foolishly. The self is formed in relationship: with friends, family, tribe. But that must be balanced by meditation, and the realization it brings — that, actually, the closest unknown is right here, in the darkness of our bodies.

“The closest unknown is right here, in the darkness of our bodies,”

— Antony Gormley

WW: Indeed — thank you for sharing such depth on this topic. It’s powerful to consider how solitude and contemplation become essential to your practice — not as a prescriptive or overtly spiritual gesture, but as a way of making space for presence and direct experience.

AG: Ana, I cannot claim any kind of spiritual status for my work. If people find the space it creates useful or uplifting, that gives me encouragement — but I don’t claim or expect it.
I make these dumb and often rusty things that sit in space. They wait for our attention, thought, and feeling. I acknowledge what they lack — but they offer an open place for our aliveness. My sculpture is a kind of acupuncture of the world, a prompt to make the passerby more vitally aware.

WW: I appreciate your humility — but your work speaks volumes. It resonates on both conscious and subconscious levels, offering a powerful yet subtle sense of connection through material and spatial presence.

AG: What have you seen of my work, Ana? What have you experienced for real?

WW: I had the pleasure of attending your previous exhibition at White Cube.

AG: “Body Politic.”

WW: I found the installations remarkably immersive and intellectually layered, prompting a renewed awareness of both body and mind. I was especially struck by the room of clay figures, which evoked early Mesopotamian civilizations — Ur, Uruk, and Assur. These foundational cities, often seen as the cradle of urban society, seemed to echo through the work.

The installation offered a compelling synthesis: using clay and modular blocks to shape the human form while gesturing toward a shared, ancestral humanity. It invited reflection on how we, as individuals, are shaped by the material, historical, and societal frameworks that both support and constrain us.

AG: I’m glad you saw that show. The reference to history and archaeology — in particular Uruk of the Sheepfold, the city as the birthplace or mothering agent of collective identity — was important to me. On one hand, it felt like a builder’s yard; on the other, like an archaeological site. I’ve just returned from Delos — a place like Palmyra or Petra — where you see only foundations and must imagine the rest. You have to make the place live in your mind. I like watching how people move through ruins. You have to slow down. You have to work to read what’s left. I wanted some of that atmosphere.

And then, yes — we’ve unlocked the human genome. I had 26, 28, or 32 consistent blocks. These were used to construct 234 individual body forms — at once buildings and bodies. Some were very abject — foetal, self-protective. Others were like sunbathers. I wanted people to project their own experience of embodiment into this lexicon of positions. We express feeling through body language, often unconsciously — but I wanted to bring that to the surface.

There’s a version of Resting Place now on in Beijing. Professor Peng Feng asked me, “How did you get this idea of making a place of relaxation?” I said, “That wasn’t the intention. I wanted to talk about the body as a place — and the only way to do that was through the body at rest, dependent on the ground.” Not the body in action, trying to achieve something, but the body acknowledging its placeness. And then I appreciated that people felt the work was peaceful. We all need places of peace. We need to switch off the mechanism that engages the body as a machine.

We really become aware of that peace in those moments before sleep, or in the bath — floating, weightless, not doing anything. There’s something womb-like in that.

Another paradox in the work is its reference to the city. Even though the figures exist together in a collective field, every body is separate, inhabiting its own space. This is a deeply contemporary question — the city as a place of both togetherness and apartness. It is an instrument of individuation, and also of social control. The most sustainable future may depend on high-density, high-rise living — but the question is how we find a balance between necessary freedom and control.

That paradox continued in the Bunkers, which expressed the sovereign state of the individual — a protected zone — in contrast to Resting Place, which conveyed a collective reality somewhere between a migrant camp and a yoga class.

WW: I also appreciated your exhibition at the Royal Academy — especially the monumental metalwork sculptures, which explored the architecture of Western civilization and the forms of containment that shape us as individuals within a meticulously measured, material-driven world. It was deeply thought-provoking.

Looking ahead to your new exhibition, particularly works like Close I and Witness II, the body often becomes a sealed interior — a darkened chamber that feels almost cosmological in scale. You’ve described “the darkness of the body” as equivalent to “the darkness of the universe.” How do you understand that interior space today?

AG: I’ve tried to explain this already — I just think it’s the place of true being, and we ignore it at our peril. That’s what most of this interview has been about.

In Western cosmology, and in the systems of the Abrahamic religions, darkness is often associated with evil or negative forces. I believe that’s a fundamental error. For me, darkness is where we most powerfully belong. The darkness of the body is the source of all energy.

We know this cosmologically. We can account for only 4% of the mass of the universe; the other 96% is dark energy or dark matter. I believe that same condition exists within us. It determines our psyches, our being. I want to acknowledge that.

And yes, you mentioned two works. Close I, for me, says that we are bodies in space — but we also contain space. We are dependent on our mother planet. Think of the Earth spinning on its axis at 1,470 kilometres an hour, orbiting the Sun at 104,000 kilometres an hour. Without gravity — without that fundamental attraction between bodies in space — we would be flung into the void. Close I is a body clinging to the planet.

Witness II accepts human jeopardy — the fact that, as E.O. Wilson puts it, we have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. The sculpture is withdrawn, but still in contact. The ears are open. It’s the last sculpture in the show — and it articulates the position of the artist as a participating observer: aware of what’s happening, both internally and externally.

Sculpture as Something Primal, A Series of Open Questions

WW: That’s incredibly illuminating — thank you. Turning to Natural Selection and Seeds II, both works place organic forms and instruments of violence in direct relation: the goose egg and the grenade, seeds and bullets. What were you inviting us to consider about destruction and renewal — and the uneasy symmetries between them?

AG: There’s no right way. I saw the show for the first time yesterday, and I was glad to see these first steps in asking: What can sculpture do? What is it good for? What can material thinking bring to an increasingly technologically empowered world in which machines think and act for us?

Sculpture is a primal, atavistic human urge — to materialise feeling and thinking. It slows consciousness right down, at a time when everything is speeding up. Every exhibition is a test site. Every work is a materialised question — always existential. The whole show is a series of open questions, which I hope each visitor will find their own way of asking.

Home and the World II, the only work that evokes movement, replicates the step of a kouros. I recently returned from Greece, where the museum on Delos houses many kouroi from the seventh and sixth centuries BC. What’s extraordinary — in these, as in Egyptian tomb guardians — is the stance: one foot placed forward, yet both remaining flat on the ground. It suggests potential movement, not its enactment. That’s important to me.

So Home and the World II is a striding figure that doesn’t actually move. It accepts the condition of sculpture as still — but the head has been replaced by a six-metre-long house: a house transformed into a journey. This is a conversation with Giacometti’s Walking Man and speaks to what it means to be grounded. The place we are grounded in is the body. A body is most grounded when it is still — yet we’re always wanting to move, to see what lies beyond the horizon, the perceptual edge of a human world. At the same time, we need a nest — a place we call home.

The sculpture acknowledges those two characteristics of human nature: the need to roam — that migratory instinct fundamental to our species — and the need for a place of nurture and safety, a place where we can grow. That dialectic has always been with us and always will be. It is the basis of both comfort and war.

“I’m still a child trying to make sense of things,”

—Antony Gormley

WW: Thank you. Your work creates space for reflection and awareness. What strikes me is how your sculptures invite a quiet return to the self — not through narrative, but through stillness and attentiveness. The framing of the body as both container and conduit resonates. In a world saturated with distraction, that invitation to listen inwardly feels both powerful and necessary.

AG: Thank you for your kind words, Ana. I’m still a child trying to make sense of things — what it means to have a precious human birth; that we are all makers of the future, of the world; that each of us has this potential to be active, conscious participants in the unfolding of a world. Art is the way that life expresses itself, but it’s also, hopefully, a place where we can re-discover — if we have lost it — the power that we all have. That power comes from an acceptance of the infinity that each of us has within us.