Royal Academy, LondonFrom its primordial gloop to the iron baby in the courtyard, Gormley´s occasionally explosive show chronicles human progress. But is he really the right person to tell the story of us all?Antony Gormley´s retrospective at the Royal Academy ends in a moment of blissful release. After tottering through low, pitch-black metal tunnels and chambers, you emerge into a gallery filled with cool sea air and a briny tang. The floor of the final beaux-arts room is submerged beneath earth and seawater. This is Host, a work he´s created a number of times over the past three decades, nodding to primordial creation, the ocean that life originally crawled from and the squidgy stuff with which artists fashioned the first figures. Here, in the bastion of civilisation that is the Royal Academy, it also becomes a tacit doomy statement about climate change. It´s the beginning and the end. That´s one of the things about Gormley´s art: it goes for big statements, while being so open-ended that it can change with context, adapting to its viewers´ concerns.This is a seriously handsome show with plenty of crowd-wowing art that aims to put `the visitor centre stage`, yet also underlines his project´s sticking points. In a recent interview, he bemoaned art´s waning ability to speak truth to power. Here, he reaches for the epic to tackle the Enlightenment dream of human progress that birthed the Royal Academy. It begins with an iron baby that he describes as a `bomb`, ripe with destructive potential but vulnerable, on the grand courtyard´s paving, framed by neoclassical walls and parked cars. No chronological retrospective, the exhibition evolves in beats, small to big, simple to spectacularly complex. Drawings track his lifelong interest in bodies and space, with a recurring solitary figure, either against the open landscape or framed by doorways, the womb, the tomb. Continue reading...
|
