If you think nostrils are just holes to breathe through, you’ve not spent enough time with Antony Gormley. A figure lying on its back, in this show of his early works, is made of solid sheets of lead, welded neatly into the form of a man, based like so much of his work on the dimensions of Gormley’s own body. Two small holes at the nose are the only perforations in an otherwise uniform metal structure. They’re not nostrils though, oh no: “Two holes at the nose reinforce the notion of the body as a conduit between physical and transcendent realms.” Gesundheit!
It’s the kind of overblown over-justification that has always blighted the work of Gormley. His body forms dot the country, peering out to sea along Crosby Beach, standing with wings spread at Gateshead, looming out at you from the lobbies of countless bank HQs. For the past 30-odd years, Gormley has been everywhere, his simple, stark figures acting as cyphers for the very act of existence in the modern world. Where you see a Gorm, you see yourself, you see humankind, persevering, surviving in nature, in the sea, in banks.
