Interview: Antony Gormley On Sculpture as Tool to Question Existence

This is a big year for internationally acclaimed artist Anthony Gormley, who is marking his museum solo debut in South Korea with a sprawling exhibition at the countryside-immersed Museum SAN, alongside his first major U.S. museum survey at the Nasher Sculpture Center. The survey spans the breadth of Gormley’s career, from his experimental work of the early 1980s to his most recent work. To mark the occasion, his two main representing galleries—Thaddaeus Ropac and White Cube—are staging in Seoul “Inextricable,” a two-part exhibition that brings together some of his most iconic works with new pieces, including sculptures that extend beyond the gallery walls to occupy White Cube’s outdoor space in the heart of the hyped Gangnam district.

At this pivotal moment of institutional recognition, as Gormley reflects on his oeuvre, we spoke with him about how his inquiry into sculpture as a tool for exploring the relationship between the human body and space has evolved over the years.

“Inextricable,” the title of Gormley’s two-part show in Seoul, illuminates the core of his practice, which has long centered on exploring and exposing the systems of relation between the human body and its surroundings—and, more specifically, with constructed space, whether architectural, political or cultural—and how these frameworks shape human behavior and the very form of our existence.

Known for his radically stylized depictions of the human body—most often in cast iron or treated bronze—Gormley uses this subject as a template to probe physical presence in space. “The body, the organic system bequeathed to us before, during and after birth, is the medium through which our engagement with the wider body of the world happens, and through which everything we have to offer the greater-than-human world is transmitted,” Gormley told Observer, at the start of our long conversation, which soon unfolded into more existential and philosophical territory.

Throughout his work, Gormley has represented and interrogated the body as both an object and a site of experience. “I insist that the primary condition of the body is as a place,” he said. For more than 40 years, he has engaged with the body in ways that challenge how it has historically been figured in the canon of sculpture.

For Gormley, the radical, reductive philosophy of art—rooted in the U.S. but influential far beyond—resulted in a Greenbergian, minimalist Puritanism that reduced painting to its barest material terms, where a painting became simply “paint on canvas” and “what you see is what you get,” collapsing matter and meaning into one. Sculpture, in turn, was stripped to spatial displacement: orthogonal, industrially fabricated masses or boxes that both defined and dislocated space. He credits Richard Serra with delivering the first meaningful rupture—restoring sculpture’s power to engage the body by revealing its potential as a place.

Gormley sees Alberto Giacometti as the last great sculptor to grapple fully with the body, and also the last to operate in the artist/model paradigm—the idea of art as a true copy rendered by an observing subject, positioning the artist as interpreter of a remote form: the body at a distance. “While he abjured narrative, it was the narrative of this very registration that became the subject of his work,” Gormley noted, reflecting on how Giacometti’s practice touched on the essence of “being,” treating both body and sculpture as space shaped from within.

Gormley has always worked to eliminate that distance, refusing the role of detached observer. Instead, he begins from the lived experience of inhabiting a body. “I regard the space we inhabit when we close our eyes—the darkness of the body—as my true subject. My concern is not about the body seen in space, but the body experienced as space. I start my inquiry from the other side of appearance.”

His central preoccupation has always been “the body as the place of being”—a commitment to using his own subjectivity as an instrument to investigate existence itself.

In the beginning, the most immediate way to capture a moment of human time, Gormley recounts, was to have his partner, painter Vicken Parsons, take plaster molds of him in basic positions. Over the past 20 years, this process has evolved into digitally scanning himself in increasingly unstable poses—a test of his very being at a specific point in time and space, with all the fragility that such a fleeting, physical presence implies. “This three-dimensional mapping allows me to freely interpret a well-known inner body zone, which has been continually extended and reduced, to acknowledge that the body is not limited by its skin,” Gormley explained.

When we asked whether this research could be understood through the lens of embodied phenomenology—particularly Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body as our primary means of perceiving the world—Gormley noted that reading Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, and later Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard and Heidegger, was profoundly influential. These thinkers helped him recognize the primacy of firsthand bodily experience through the senses and sparked his interest in the “proprioception of being” as a form of awareness not tethered to goal-oriented action.

At the same time, he recalls that his introduction to inner perception may have started much earlier, through childhood experiences of enforced stillness—later deepened by two years of Vipassana training under S.N. Goenka in India in the early 1970s. “This training provided the basis of my methodology and allowed me to return the body to sculpture in a manner that didn’t depend on making a perfect copy or any recourse to either representation or narrative.”

Gormley’s sculptures are designed to sharpen viewers’ physical awareness and spatial consciousness, prompting reflection on scale, position and one’s place within a broader web of relations and interdependencies. “Many of my works come from a captured and acknowledged moment of self-awareness,” he reflected. “I would like to think that they can be used as instruments for exactly this kind of spatial and temporal locating.”

For him, a work does not truly exist until it receives the active attention of a viewer. That experience begins by walking around it, looking at it, perhaps touching it, and becoming aware of its material qualities and construction. He hopes this physical interaction leads to a deeper cognitive inquiry—what the work is and why it invites attention. “My ambition is that it should invite a kind of empathic inhabitation; my project fails if it doesn’t,” Gormley said, adding how such engagement locates a human presence in space through familiar orientations.

Crucially, since the work only exists when it is seen, its meaning arises through engagement. Gormley considers his art a form of co-production, made possible by the meeting of absence in the work and presence in the viewer. “I want to use the catalytic potential of sculpture’s silence and stillness to activate the viewer’s freedom of mind and body.”.

As simulacra of the human body, the sculptures lack thought, feeling and movement; only through the viewer’s projection of these faculties do they become art. This not only empowers the viewer with agency but also fosters awareness of their position within a vital web of interrelations—the very system that substantiates and gives meaning to existence. For Gormley, signification in sculpture, as in all spaces surrounding the self, is a process of co-production that demands far more than visual recognition.

Site-specific and viewer-specific sculptures: different approaches between Seoul and Dallas

Gormley sees sculpture is inherently site-specific, but just as importantly, it is viewer-specific. Its meaning depends not only on the context in which it is placed but also on the active engagement of the beholder. When asked how his exhibitions in South Korea might differ from his U.S. survey, given distinct audiences, Gormley notes that his show at the Nasher Sculpture Center was conceived with a clear retrospective framework.

On view through January 4, his “SURVEY: Antony Gormley” looks back at the trajectory of his practice, continually shaped by one central question: “What is sculpture good for?” “The Nasher show attempts to chart how I have used sculpture as a form of materialized skepticism,” Gormley said.

This foundational skepticism—toward both the conventions of sculpture and the conditions of human existence—has long fueled his inquiry. It begins with two works conceived 45 years ago, now on view in Dallas: Footpath, a pair of shoe soles and twisting lines cut from peeled rubber boots and Blanket Drawing V, which traces the place of a sleeping body.

Gormley hopes the retrospective’s chronological arc is not its only narrative. By placing early and later works in dialogue, he encourages the viewer’s attention to move dynamically between them, forming a matrix that invites active, receptive engagement. “I have tried to use the elegance and clarity of Renzo Piano’s light-filled spaces to introduce the world of the work as it has happened in time, without the narrative of the work being chronological,” he noted.

In South Korea, however, Gormley’s work takes a more outward-facing stance. “Here, my works engage with the texture of the street as a matrix that extends the body. If the body is our first habitation, the rooms, buildings, towns and cities that have now become the primary habitat of our species are our second body.” For this reason, his dual show in Seoul was designed to render both galleries porous—to test how the worlds we construct, in turn, construct us.

At White Cube, situated on the busy downtown streets of Cheongdam, the exhibition spills into public space. One work, Gormley observes, acts like a rock in the current of passersby, traffic and parked electric bikes—the restless tide of urban life. “I want to make context into content. I want to acknowledge that the world is itself a picture and that we are in it. For me, the privatization of art has been a loss for sculpture. Sculpture is made to be shared and has the potential to mark and catalyze place.”

At Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul, located in the more established Hannam district, Gormley turns inward—activating the gallery’s interiors with works that extend from body to building boundary, affirming our need for, and sense of, belonging. The gallery’s domestic scale and first-floor position made this treatment possible, he pointed out. Both Extended Strapworks and Here and Now were created specifically for Thaddaeus Ropac, shaped in direct response to the space and its dialogue with sculpture and viewer.

The use of scale to prompt existential questions

Scale has always played a central role in Gormley’s practice. His figures range from life-size to monumental, each shift in dimension prompting different emotional and existential responses—amplifying vulnerability, isolation or universality in the viewer’s encounter. “I think of scale as an intrinsic quality of sculpture, one that can be used effectively to increase the viewer’s awareness of their own position in space and time,” Gormley said. “Playing with scale is one of the great joys of sculpture, but making scale meaningful, rather than simply enlarging something for its own sake, is really important.”

In the Nasher show, all large-scale works are represented by models. In Seoul, by contrast, White Cube includes two over-life-size pieces. Other monumental projects developed over the years—Exposure in the Netherlands, Angel of the North in England and the recent Alert for Imperial College London—were each shaped by their context: expansive landscapes in the first two cases and the courtyard of a university campus in the latter.

Gormley said he is especially excited that Elemental—included in the Nasher show as a model—is now being fabricated at full scale in Korea. The work will be installed on a 200-metre-deep tidal flat off the north coast of Bigeum-do Island in Shinan Province. Measuring 110 meters long, 23 meters high, 18 meters deep and weighing 340 tons, it will be the largest object he has ever created.

“I think of it as an offering from our human species to the elements, hoping for our continued participation in the evolution of the biosphere,” Gormley said. He describes being deeply moved by the life of this province, which spans nearly 1,000 islands—more than 700 of them uninhabited. Its dispersed population lives entirely from growing rice and spinach, producing sun-dried sea salt and harvesting seaweed and bivalves. “I hope this work materializes these ultra-sustainable means of co-production with nature.”

The role of sculpture today

In fact, particularly when viewed through the lens of his outdoor works—even the more human-scaled figures installed in “GROUND” at Museum SAN—it becomes clear that Gormley’s practice both challenges and redefines the monumentality traditionally associated with sculpture. These works cultivate a more conscious, reciprocal relationship with their surroundings, including the natural world.

Despite their consistent use of the human form, Gormley’s sculptures resist the anthropocentric impulse that has long defined sculpture’s canon. They are not tributes to historic figures or heroes, nor invocations of gods or ancestral spirits. Instead, they are earthly instruments that awaken our senses and cognitive faculties, prompting us to rethink our constrained position within a broader, interdependent ecosystem.

Having his career surveyed in a space like the Nasher Sculpture Center offers Gormley an ideal platform to reflect on, challenge and expand the legacy of sculpture as a medium. So we asked him what role sculpture can still play in contemporary society—as an inherently earthy, physical form in an increasingly mediated and abstract world. “The potential of sculpture to reinforce first-hand physical experience excites me,” Gormley admitted, noting that in the final stage of his life, he wants to make more situated work that catalyzes and creates place. “My test for good sculpture is that you can’t think of the work without thinking of the place, and vice versa.”

For Gormley, the price sculpture paid in the 20th Century for freeing itself from the service of power has been its withdrawal from the collective realm. Even sculpture parks, in his view, too often resemble zoos for displaced works—objects that have either lost their place or never made one to begin with.

By contrast, he conceived Elemental as a work made by Koreans in Korea, for Koreans—something as far removed as possible from the privatized, commercialized and commodified art market. “It follows a pre-modern model, celebrating the values and lifestyle of a community,” he said. This may sound utopian, but in a world increasingly enchanted by the digital and virtual—where the physical is being displaced—he believes it’s precisely what we need. “The palpable and the visual lead to the imaginable.”

If art still has any purpose today, Gormley considered, it is to help us imagine a viable future and recognize how much each of us is a maker of that future. Situating this vast work within an elemental context—shifting light, rising tides, changing weather and the slow colonization by oysters, mollusks and seaweed—is, for him, an act of hope. “It reminds us that our species can and will persist, and recognizes that our continued life cannot be at the expense of the greater-than-human world.”

Looking back on 45 years of practice from this apex of global institutional recognition, Gormley remains committed to keeping the inquiry open—making art that continues to ask fundamental questions about what it means to exist as humans in this world. “Both Buddha and Socrates believed that ethics were more important than metaphysics, and that learning how to live was more important than defining ultimate truths. For me, art is both a tool for discovering values and an instrument for their arising,” he stated.

“It’s sad that the commodification and institutionalization of art have denied its ability to be a magnet for, and a maker of, collective agency,” he continued, reflecting on how, when he looks at ancient sculptures like the Moai of Rapa Nui, the Serpent Mounds of Ohio, Stonehenge, the Nasca lines, the Mayan Temples of the Yucatán and Guatemala, Borobudur, Angkor Wat or the European Gothic cathedrals, he still finds inspiration and hope. “These works show us that we can make art that brings us together and gives us a reason to be together,” he concluded, affirming his pursuit of a similar kind of sculpture—timeless in its collective resonance, rooted in the essence of human existence and capable of speaking across geographies and centuries.

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