, the anatomy of the body is translated into tectonics to expose the vulnerability and indeterminacy of the human condition. The language of pillar, lintel, stacking and off-set and the relative positions of the blocks is what carries feeling.

Made of a provisional sculptural material – plaster – the cellular elements of a standing, lying and crouching forms are placed singularly or in groups, and can be easily assembled and disassembled. The participation of the viewer is solicited in empathising with the construction but inherent instability in the making of a whole body.

‘Gormley’s plaster figures bear some formal resemblanceto Van Doesburg’s dynamic concretemodels for 

or Georges Vantongerloo’s‘Interrelation of Volumes’ sculptures of thoseyears; they call to mind too the ‘Architektons’ ofKasimir Malevich, those complex assemblages ofplaster blocks (‘molecules of energy’) throughwhich he expressed his futuristic architectural visionin the 1920s. These models, most of them nowlost but famous through photographs, wereMalevich’s propositions for an architecture ofSuprematism, expressions in ideal form ofSuprematism’s cosmic consciousness, its symbolictriumph of energy and space over solid matterand gravity. ‘A man buried in a cubemust liberate himself’, proclaimed Malevich in1918;18 and, speaking of his vision of theSuprematist future: ‘In this new world, we feelcrowded on earth, we soar in space, we hollow outnew passages in its elastic body…’

, Salzburg: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 2013, pp. 26-29

Plaster Works

, 2012, plaster, 48 × 71 × 61 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

Retreat IV

, 2012, plaster, 298.5 × 68.2 × 51 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

Catch II

, 2012, plaster, 73.5 × 112.5 × 93 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

Retreat III

, 2012, plaster, 38.2 × 99.7 × 294.7 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

Plaster Works

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