‘People, for whatever reason, do associate me with the body - I think that's fair enough,’ says Antony Gormley when we catch up over Zoom, as he prepares to open Aerial at White Cube New York. ‘But I am, and always have been, as interested in the body of the viewer as I am in mine, as an example of a human body in space.’
It is a preoccupation he is building on in Aerial through sculpture, which references his earlier considerations of proprioceptive environments we have seen in the cave-like Room, the immersive Blind Light and in the Breathing Room drawings. ‘They are all attempts to somehow capitalise space itself and make environments in which the viewer’s body is invited to sense its own movement through time and space,’ Gormley adds. ‘And you could say that there are a number of works that do both. Take Model, Space Station, Cave – all of those are, as it were, buildings, but made with reference to the form of the body that you can actually enter and move through. And I'm continuing that line of thought.’
