Cast iron sculpture

181.2 x 51 x 36 cm. 71 3/8 x 20 1/8 x 14 1/8 in.

Incised with name initials, numbers and dates in English on the bottom of the work
PROVENANCE
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris
Important Private Collection, Asia

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Paris

The Human Body is the Best Picture of the Human Soul
Internationally Renowned Sculptor Antony Gormley Makes Waves With 'Seize IV'

I really believe this that sculpture in its crude materiality can touch in and liberate feelings that we would not know that we had.
——Antony Gormley

As one of the UK's most important modern artists, the figure sculptures, installations and public art works of Antony Gormley reveal an extraordinary dimension of life. Unlike Henry Moore, who transforms sculptures of people into imposing Earth deities or Paul McCarthy who reveals a dark side to human nature in his works, Gormley's creations are akin to souls detached from the world that give viewers a sense of the eternal and boundless nature of life.

Second Body: World Collection 'Fellow Traveler'

Gormley was born in London in 1950 and after completing his studies lived in India and Sri Lanka for three years, where he explored meditation. This experience encouraged him to reflect on the depth of the relationship between the human body, time and space, which led to a realization about “the ultimate value of people” and provided a motif for his later creative work. After returning home, Gormley undertook advanced studies at Goldsmiths College and Slade School of Fine Art, where he explored “people” further from both a theoretical and creative perspective, finally making a name for himself in the art world with his Cubist style block sculptures that were praised as “the second body” of individual existence.

In 1994, Gormley received the Turner Prize, the most prestigious modern art award in the UK, for Field for the British Isles and four years later created what was at the time the largest outdoor sculpture in the UK Angel of the North, which made him an internationally renowned artist. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph listed him fourth on a list of the “100 most powerful people in British culture.” In 2014, Queen Elizabeth II conferred on him a knighthood in the New Year Honours list for outstanding contributions to modern British art. Since the mid-1990s, Gormley has been at the forefront of Western human figure-themed sculpture, a genre he has imbued with new energy. Whether a motorway in Gateshead, England, Lake Ballard in Western Australia or the Dutch harbor of Lelystad, Gormley has installed different shaped figure sculptures in locations around the world that are not only modern marks of human civilization but also “fellow travelers” for people in every day life.

As of 2019, Antony Gormley has held nearly 230 solo exhibitions in more than 30 countries and is popular wherever he goes. In September 2019, the Royal Academy of Arts held a huge retrospective of his work, described as “one of the most attention-grabbing British artistic events of the past decade.” Currently, the artist's works have been collected by more than 116 major art museums around the world, including the Tate Modern in the UK, The British Museum, The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, The Centre Pompidou in France, The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in South Korea and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, making Antony Gormley perhaps the most acknowledged living sculptor who is also beloved by the market.

Hidden Bodies, Awoken Souls

I am that object. And that seems to me an enormous advantage, you can not ever be inside another substance as you are inside your own body.
——Antony Gormley, 1987

In the late 1980s, Gormley started to use his own body as a prototype, posed in positions that most closely reflect his own inner emotional reaction. Moreover, in the more than 20 years since then, as technological techniques and media have developed, he has continued to explore how to express different visual types of “body.” It was in about 2000 that Gormley first broke through the boundaries of representational art, creating the semi-abstract Domain Series, through combinations of lines in different space. Two years later, he started to use three dimensional mosaic-type block elements, expanding his human bodies from two dimensions into three dimensions. Thereafter, the artist continued to introduce deeper evolutions to the series, resulting in his most popular “block” creations.

The auction work, Seize IV, was created in 2015 and comes from Gormley's longest-lasting block style work Cubic Series. The work showcases a landmark breakthrough from his latest Big Block Series after 2014. Roughly the height of a real person and the perfect dimensions for an indoor collection, the piece perfectly reflects the artist's creative thinking over the past 20 years. Standing 180cm in height, Seize IV is built from 19 regularly cut rectangular iron blocks, but the iron block structure is larger and made up of fewer blocks than earlier sculptures by Gormley. This gives the work a simpler body shape, though the rich changes that inform the spatial arrangement are as before. Viewed from the side and looking up, the piece resembles a perilous abstract column, but if rotated 45 degrees, the body shape is naturally revealed, appearing clenched like a fist, with the arms and head moving forward. The larger blocks also mean that the metal itself conveys a powerful sense of tension, but this is dissolved through extrusion and collision to create a balanced construct. At the same time, using large pieces of cast metal alloy creates a calm sense of volume, with Gormley strengthening the existential awareness of “people,” wherein the more abstract the shapes the greater the psychological resonance of the work.

Since the second half of the 20th Century body-figure art has permeated minimalist and conceptual artistic expression, making it an important component of modern art, theory and critical writing. Indeed, Gormley reveals a similar ambition in his works, infusing static spatial art with “the movement of people” and his “personal world view,” rebelling against the binary juxtaposition of “body/soul” in rationalist Western philosophy as did Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brancusi and others. In Seize IV the artist uses fine sanding and polishing of the blocks to imbue the work with a sense of modernity. In this way, the cubes that make up the body are like layers of building blocks piled on top of each other, creating a figure that could have walked straight out of a Cubist painting. The work has an amusing life-dynamism as a “portrait” of movement within stillness, whereas from a different side the changing shapes become a shouting “self.”

It should be noted that the abstract artistic language and mechanical body construct in Seize IV in no way eliminate the human warmth of the piece. Indeed, they give viewers an equal and independent visual and spiritual experience. The portrait Gormley creates here does not narrate a story as he merely uses the body as a medium to showcase a “focused” posture. The shapes increase in cohesion as they move toward the center, as if ready to do battle and radiating a will to exist, in a way that exudes the existence of eternal life. In this work, the artist does not seek to directly express anything about people, but rather highlights the “presence” of people. Stood before this solid and calm geometric shape, viewers can feel first hand the insignificance and fragility of the human body, but it is precisely this fragility that imbues us with the power of human nature.

Multidimensional Interpretations, Emotional Projections

Gormley views sculpture as “a painting in space” and after mastering the basics of modeling technology used his outstanding imagination and contemplative understanding of life to break with the realism that long underscored traditional human figure sculpture. Utilizing the moving visual representation of Cubism, the block shape figure structure disassembles the human body in three-dimensional space to become the projection of a digital technology “pixilated” portrait.

In the era of the electronic revolution, body images are created from countless tiny, repeated pixel particles bereft of life and thought. In this context, the differences between people are like a block game in the world of pixels, as a result of which faced with electronic technology people gradually lose self-controlled awareness of existence. Through the small block structures of his earlier works Gormley uses richly dynamic changes to reveal the inherent confusion of people in modern society. In Seize IV, he takes the uneasiness that comes from a place deep inside and transforms it into the mutual pressure between large blocks. However, unlike most sculptures that take “people” as their motif, the works of Gormley deliberately eliminate the flexibility of the human body and although the solid geometric blocks appear indestructible one push and they would topple to the ground like so many building blocks. Moreover, the undulating borders of these blocks and the signs of air holes left naturally in every one by the forging process, ingeniously embodies the complex emotional experience that stems from the co-existence of “strength and frailty” as humanity faces the vastness of the world.

For Gormley, the significance of sculpture comes not from the artist himself but relies more on the objective experience of viewers when they look at the work. The completion of Seize IV comes from its coexistence in space, and the fact that the “body” is the same height as a real person. In this sense, it not only represents the will of the artist, but also a medium through which viewers and the external work world communicate. Moreover, as the eyes of the viewer move, different block structures become body portraits of divergent emotions and by focusing on “people” the works of Antony Gormley elevate “art.” The artist views the body as an “active painting brush,” while space is a “graphic medium” that provides background narrative. In this way, Gormley uses his art to explain the philosophical musing of Wittgenstein that: “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”

Price estimate:
HKD: 3,800,000 – 4,800,000
USD: 490,300 – 619,400

Auction Result:
HKD: --