1 March – 18 July 2015

Second Body continued Antony Gormley’s investigation of body and space, interrogating the body as place and architecture as the primary conditioner of our experience of space. Gormley fully exploited the scale and volumes of the former foundry sheds that now form the gallery, catalysed our experience of space and time through works that either constituted or were arranged as “fields”. In a recent statement, the artist described being “increasingly interested in the tropes of framing, containing and constructing being freed from architecture’s shelter function… to make a psychological architecture that allows surface and mass, light and dark, open and closed volumes free play in works that become places for an adventure in real time.”

The first exhibition space was occupied by the work Hole, a four-metre-high model of a house as a body. This work objectified and internalised the relationship between a perceiving human body and its habitat by mining and perforating the normally closed body-volumes using the languages of cells, corridors, shafts and windows, presenting the subjective body as a mansion of many chambers.

This idea of the transmutation of the anatomical body into interconnected cells continued in the second gallery space with the installation Expansion Field. The sixty sculptures that constituted this piece were arranged in four rows; a totalised environment constructed in Corten steel sheet from expansions of over twenty fundamental body poses. Each work evolved by regular increments of expansion to each of the constituent cells of a particular body stack. Together the group of sculptures formed a field similar in appearance to the repeated units of a minimalist installation or the rows of megaliths at Carnac.

In the largest and highest space in the exhibition another field was installed. Here, well over life-size cast iron stelae immersed viewers in a forest of totemic presence, in which they were invited to intuit somatic gestalts evoking a variety of emotions, from resistance to delirium.

The final work in the exhibition, Matrix II, was made specifically for the fourth space of our Paris Pantin gallery. It was virtual architecture, a three-dimensional drawing that identified sixteen room-sized volumes that interconnected around a void space equivalent to two adjacent standing bodies. Using re-enforcing mesh, the skeleton of cast-concrete buildings, Matrix II interrogated the form and structure of the human habitat. This work revealed itself to the gaze of an ambulatory visitor and invited visual penetration, while denying physical access. The challenge of distinguishing foreground, mid-ground and background in the multiple layers of mesh was a vertiginous optical task. As the viewer circulated around the work it created a disorientating perceptual field in which figure/ground relations became inverted and the accelerating effects of compressed perspective confused the eye.

The effect of each of these works displayed through the four halls in Pantin was to disorientate the viewers and invite them on a journey of auto-observation. Second Body was a continuation of the artist's conception of the exhibition as a physical and psychological test site.