In Formation, White Cube Mason's Yard, London, UK
13 November 2019–18 January 2020
This is the product of a whole developmental series lasted for more than two years where I provided digital aggregation to Antony Gormley from which his sculptures could be extracted from and then cast.
In Formation is an exhibition of new cast iron work that questions to what extent we are the product of our environment, and to what extent we are makers of it.
The nine new blockworks, called ‘Aggregates’, are made up of aggregated blocks that treat matter as information and use the language of code to suggest both struggle and symbiosis between body and block. Each rusted figure appears to extricate itself or to take support from a material mass, referencing Michelangelo’s famous ‘Slaves’, where a body seems to be emerging out of the solid block. Here Gormley asks, ‘Is the body the product of the block, or the block the product of the body?’
Discussing his interest in the transformation that digitalisation has engendered in the way we relate to the world and ourselves, Gormley has spoken of this ‘not as a noble conflict between spirit and matter, but an overturning of fixed principles that gives way to a continual and fluid translation from information into form and from form into information’.
