The visual impact of Antony Gormley’s major show, ‘Second Body’, is immediate; from his precise and densely packed arrangement of 60 orthogonal forms to his impenetrable, dimensional grid of steel.

Upon entry, visitors are confronted by a massive, peaked sculpture that stands four metres tall, its silhouette conflating house and body. Beyond this, a series of towering cast iron figures that Gormely calls “unstable vertical columns”. “By implication, they make you feel smaller and more vulnerable,’ the artist explains ‘And yet here are these things that are curiously like child-like, like lego.”

To the right of the central hall, the installation titled Matrix II – a maze of gigantic sentinels that can only be experienced from the periphery. “There’s nothing to recognise, no reading to be done,’ Gormley said of the latter. ‘Here is this environment revealed now in its skeletal form. Your body can’t penetrate it but your mind with its eyes can.”

‘Second Body’ runs until 18th July at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

Read the full post on Wallpaper.