Antony Gormley’s Polyhedral ‘Aperture’

After three years of experimentation with connecting bubbles and foams nesting in a cell structure of polyhedra, the British artist Antony Gormley is presenting his work using the material at the Xavier Hufkens gallery in Brussels. His experimentation with cell aggregates of nesting polyhedra in both solid and space-frame forms turns the space of the body into an open framework of tetrahedral, cubic, dodecahedral and more complex polygons which, in his words, “achieved a breakthrough when released from a bounding skin.” The press release reads:

The main room of the Hufkens gallery for this exhibition from floor to ceiling and wall to wall will be entirely filled with a polyhedral space- frame into which the body of the viewer is invited to wander. Completely negating the orthogonal geometries of regular architecture, this aggregate surrounds a void: a human-shaped cave at around ten times life size.

The same body-at-rest is made massive and life-size and lies on the floor of the gallery up a short flight of stairs. The rest of the works in the exhibition continue to explore bubble geometry in a number of different ways – standing and falling forms in both solid and cloud formations.

Gormley’s work has always explored the body as a place rather than an object, and here he takes us into a new zone of structural complexity while at the same time evoking the body as an open space of possibility connected with the earth as well as space at large. The main installation could be conceived of as a space/time map in which hundreds of spheres are held in space by drawing a constellation between them within which the body of the viewer is allowed free passage.

Xavier Hufkens Gallery