BOOK: Antony Gormley-WITNESS, White Cube

Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. Published on the occasion of Antony Gormley’s exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard (23/4-8// 2025), the catalogue “WITNESS” charts the artist’s experimentations with lead between the 1970s and 1990s, addressing artistic, ecological, and political concerns. From early experimentations pertaining to the material alchemical properties and potentials of lead, to the later large-scale body sculptures contending with the intrinsic stillness and silence of the form, Gormley’s preoccupation with lead enabled a fertile visual language to develop. Also the book serves as a companion to catalogue accompanying Gormley’s exhibition, “Body Politic” (2023), and features extensive installation and artwork views tracing the evolution of his sculptural practice across scale, time and form. Using the title of the exhibition as a thematic through which to examine the works, Jorella Andrews considers the relevance of Gormley’s enduring interest in the figure of ‘the witness’ within the contemporary world. An in-conversation with Lucia Pietroiusti explores a career-long exercise in finding balance in the human-ecological relationship.-Dimitris Lempesis