Rising to over 2 meters tall and weighing over 1.5 tonnes, Gormley’s work ‘Show' is positioned amongst the cherry trees, located on the road between Subodh Gupta's 'People Tree' and Doug Aitken’s 'Sonic Mountain' within Donum's eucalyptus grove. ‘Show’ belongs to Gormley’s ‘Extended Blockworks’ series, which push blocks outwards towards the surrounding context. They attempt to extend emotion through formal means and become static points of reference against which the viewer’s movements might be calibrated.
Of this series Antony Gormley has said, “I have always felt that the body is not limited by its edge – that we both remember and project our embodiment and sense our context. These works literally reach out into space and, in their stacked condition, materialize a sense of anticipation and recall."
Biography
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. Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007, the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2013. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year’s Honours list in 2014. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003.