NYAB Event - Antony Gormley "Breathing Room II"

Antony Gormley "Breathing Room II"

Sean Kelly Gallery

This event has ended.

The relation between consciousness and space has been explored by Antony Gormley's work for 30 years: investigating the body as the bounding box of mind, and architecture as an enclosing structure for the body. Testing these two conditions is the concern of BREATHING ROOM II, Antony Gormley's third exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery.

Alternating between 15,000 watts of brilliant light and no light at all, the main gallery contains the work of the show's title: a 3 dimensional drawing in space that describes 36 cubic meters with a photo-luminescent space-frame, stretching it along different axes and repeating it five times to make a nesting set. The work hovers between being architecture and being an image of architecture.

The viewer becomes the subject in an experiential field that oscillates between the meditative and the interrogative. On a repeated cycle, brilliant halogens come on for short bursts and then plunge the viewer and space into darkness in which the subject is implicated in a visual field framed by unstable but insistent glowing perspectives that allow free movement around and within them.

In this installation the artist provides a ground in which the viewer's present experience is extended and tested through a deconstruction of spatial ordering allowing the viewer to become a self-observing figure in a disorientating ground. This intervention with the viewer's sense of spatial ordering continues with the other freestanding works in the exhibition – 3 of Gormley's newest sculptures, in which the orthogonal structure and absolute geometry of the built environment, both compressed and extended, is applied to a new investigation of the abstract body.

Media

• Architecture
• Sculpture

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