19th October 2023
The exhibition of Antony Gormley opened at Musée Rodin in Paris this week, including his major installation ‘Critical Mass’ with 60 figures, each cast five times from 12 moulds of the artist's body. SPHERE’s Lisa Barnard attended the preview and met the British sculptor, who explained how his life-long conversation with Auguste Rodin has developed over the decades. The exhibition could not be more timely in its relevance and resonance. Here we present our Antony Gormley Musée Rodin review.
The new Antony Gormley sculpture exhibition opened at the beautiful Musée Rodin in Paris this week - a meeting of minds, processes and techniques between the renowned contemporary British sculptor and the legendary Auguste Rodin in the memorable and manicured setting of Rodin's spiritual home. Gormley’s works, including the major installation Critical Mass, have been thoughtfully integrated into the gardens and museum, including the majestic Hotel Biron.
I was privileged to be given a private tour on the eve of the opening by the exhibition’s curator Sophie Biass-Fabiani and to meet the sculptor himself Antony Gormley, one-to-one at the “vernissage” (the private view). I also enjoyed meeting the Musee Rodin’s dynamic Director Amelie Simier, pictured further below.
Seeing this exhibition just days after the attacks in Israel and Gaza felt poignant. The sculpted bodies and their collective compositions, in prostrate, curled up, kneeling, in suspended positions, piled one on top of each other, resonated. As the world mourns the recent deaths, this is a homage to the human form, from foetal position to death. The line of 12 ends face to face with Rodin's "The Gates of Hell' and the rendez-vous between the two art forms could not be more relevant. The bodies are heavy, weighing 650KG each, and they weigh heavily on the viewer.
I asked Antony Gormley about his relationship with Auguste Rodin and how the exhibition came about. He explained, in his gravelly voice: “This is not like any other exhibition. This is a shrine to one of the key players in the evolution of European sculpture. So I didn’t want to take over the place. It was the opportunity for making a conversation through the silent, still language. The foundation of the whole show was can we just take a few words, one of Rodin’s and one of mine, and allow them to share the same space and talk to each other about their different attitudes to the body?”
Gormley continued: “It's been an extraordinary adventure because on one level, when I was a young artist, Rodin was the last person that you would be interested in. I looked at the work of American minimalism, such as Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Donald Judd and Bruce Nauman. They were the people who liberated sculpture into a more honest relation with the way that we relate to materials.
“So the idea of industrial processes – the use of Carl Andre’s sheet metals or the use of [Richard] Serra’s used of very large sheets of rolled steel. That liberated sculpture into a kind of robust industrial language. I mean the processes of cutting, rolling, and organising things through an orthogonal geometry”.
if you are a physicist, which I am not, you will know that 'critical mass' describes the density of a nuclear isotope which is needed for fission to occur. At the centre of the exhibition is this Critical Mass and has social implications. It's an installation with life-sized sculptures set in the museum’s temporary exhibition space “la Chapelle’ and the gardens. CGormley hones in on 12 positions fundamental to the human body, casts each five times and then places them in contrasting configurations. Standing in the Chapelle on my own, the installation was evocative and eerie. The figures are crawling, squatting, twisted, curled up, kneeling and standing, some suspended in mid-air, others positioned on the ground. Some bodies are pressed against a wall or sit in silent isolation. A dense cluster of cast iron bodies are piled one upon another. In the current political situation, it is triggering of human humility, fragility and chaos. I found it impossible to speak while viewing this.
As Gormley explained: “Critical Mass has multiple meanings. Firstly, it’s a term from nuclear physics that describes the necessary density of a nuclear isotope needed for fission to take place. This is an example of our extraordinary human ability to harness the material potential of elements in our environment. How we use that potential is critical, but so is how we use the potential of sculpture to engage us. If we go back to the question, what is sculpture, once you accept the body as a suitable subject, then you are also asking, what is a human being? So, these masses are critical – critical deconstructions and displacements of the human condition.”
“The 60 bodies of Critical Mass II express the Taylorist urge to replicate, to produce multiples, which is precisely the foundation of mass production in the Industrial Age. They are industrial fossils, humanly-made mineral masses. that have been transformed by human experience, but which also relate to the time of cosmic events.”
Inside the Hotel Burin, Gormley’s works are integrated into Rodin displays. Although completely different, they complement and interrogate each other. This could not be more the case with the Colossal Head of Balzac and Gormley’s parallel work. Gormley's works are effective indoors and outdoors. At one extremity of the gardens, beyond the confrontational display of Rodin's Gates, hovers the delicate figure of "Domain Field". It is perched atop the wall, facing outwards. When we visited, even though a diminutive size, it glinted in the sun.
The exhibition has been 5 years in planning. The Musee Rodin’s curator Sophie Biass-Fabiani and Gormley had a first meeting in 2018, just one week before the Covid lockdown. His agent contracted COVID a week later. It also includes the most comprehensive display of Gormley’s drawings and sketches. Biass-Fabiani is passionate about his works, and feels the rapport between Rodon and Gormley is powerful: "Sculpture is a kind of skin, and the second skin of the body is the architecture outside." Some pieces such as a life-size size plaster mould which has been reworked on the inside by Gormley for the exhibition and placed next to Rodin's maquette "Study for Balzac's Dressing Gown". It is a tool that has become a piece of art.
Gormley was intimately involved not just in the choice of pieces but the paces they inhabited at Musee Rodin: On a wall in the Musée Rodin’s gardens, one of my ‘Domain’ sculptures is seen against the sky, encouraging visitors to look skyward towards other rhythms of life found in the elemental world. To its right, six of my ‘Insiders’ are placed alongside Rodin’s monumental white marble sculptures. Here, we see something about the core of human experience in relation to its idealisation or romanticisation. These works express, in concentrated form, traces of body attitude, and in this context become dark silhouettes punctuating blocks of white calcium carbonate."
“I think going to Meudon [Musee Rodin Meudon] and seeing his own collection of antique works and then understanding how he was just constantly playing. So how does this look the other way up? ‘Iris’ [messenger of the gods] is a brilliant example of that: Arecumbent women who when upright suddenly becomes a powerful symbol of female self-determination. The critical mass takes that. Whole idea. You can liberate something from its narrative ‘illustrational-ness,’ by simply allowing the object nature of the thing to start to talk to the ground that it finds itself on, in a free way. You end up somewhere surprising and maybe unintentional, and you end up wanting to offer that to the viewer.”
Rodin’s and Gormley’s lives did not intersect in real life – Rodin died in 1917 and Gormley was born in 1950, now 73. To meet him, he is energetic, empathetic and spirited. He spoke at the private view to a rapt audience with profound observations and insights in fluent French without notes. I asked him about how his relationship with Rodin had evlved: “At a certain point I realised that I had to return to first principles ,and I returned to the body less as an object and more as a place – a place of ‘in-dwelling’.
Gormley explained to me that he rejected Rodin in his early years and it has been a journey to build the dialogue: “It was obvious at some point that I would have to come back to an artist whom I had rejected as being irrelevant, an artist whose oily sexuality was problematic to me. Then doing this show has been an amazing learning experience for me, because in a sense it is his plasters, not his bronzes, that tell us most about him and his working method. The fact that he was prepared to use his own work as a raw material for later works and this playfulness that comes into the late works from the 1880s onwards. I learned a lot from him
The viewer will be enthralled by this exhibition, I can guarantee you. The Rodin Museum is one of my favourite places in Paris, if not the world. Catching Gormley
Antony Gormley Critical Mass 17 October-03 March 2024 Musee Rodin, 77 Rue de Varenne 75007 Paris, supported by Thaddeeus Ropac Gallery.
