Antony Gormley’s Slabworks extend the language of his earlier Blockworks and explore the human body as both structure and presence. Composed of interlocking planes that build a body, these works hold a tension between inward reflection and outward orientation. Cast in solid iron as a single form, the Slabwork 'Look III' conveys weight and permanence, while its open, stacked construction introduces a sense of balance poised against vulnerability.
Originally conceived in response to a commission for Pilane, an ancient burial site along the Baltic coast of southern Sweden, the Slabworks were developed in dialogue with an expansive landscape: open ground, distant horizons, and vast skies. Their form recalls both the precariousness of a house of cards and the enduring mass of megalithic structures, binding contemporary urban sensibility to deep historical memory.
At The Donum Estate, 'Look III' is sited on a hillside, where its verticality and shifting planes engage directly with the surrounding terrain and long vineyard views. Set within an open landscape, the figure becomes at once a solitary presence and a point of connection—anchored to the earth, oriented toward the horizon, and in quiet conversation with the land.
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.
