Following in the footsteps of Ai Weiwei and Anselm Kiefer, Antony Gormley will be the next artist to take over the 

 Main Galleries with a series of works that test the scale and light of the RA’s architecture.

The exhibition will explore Gormley’s wide-ranging use of organic, industrial and elemental materials over the years, including iron, steel, hand-beaten lead, seawater and clay. We will also bring to light rarely-seen early works from the 1970s and 1980s, some of which led to Gormley using his own body as a tool to create work, as well as a selection of his pocket sketchbooks and drawings.

‘I want this exhibition to encourage present, first-hand experience. It will concentrate on the body in space: firstly, the viewer's body, through a series of proprioceptive environments that enhance awareness, alertness and sensorial space, and secondly in the presentation of discrete objects that evoke what it feels like to inhabit a human body.’

, 2004, Kusthaus Bregenz, Austria. Installation view. Photograph by Markus Tretter.