May 7 through June 18, 2016

Extended through July 29, 2016

Sean Kelly is pleased to present CONSTRUCT, a major one-person exhibition of new and key early works by world-renowned artist Antony Gormley. Acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space, Gormley’s fifth solo exhibition with Sean Kelly engages the grid to evoke the experience of inhabiting a human body at “the other side of appearance.” The opening reception will take place on Friday, May 6, from 6 to 8pm, and the artist will be present. The exhibition begins with a life-size work from Gormley’s series of ‘Bodycases,’ Bridge (1985), in the front gallery space. This is one of the earliest works made from a plaster mould of the artist’s body, strengthened with fiberglass and encased in a skin of lead. Gormley sees Bridge as an objective mapping of the subjective space of the human body. The visible soldering lines on its surface form clear horizontal and vertical axes: the body is treated as the location of physical and spatial experience. Bridge is presented alongside Scaffold (2015), a recent work in which Gormley has translated the grid of horizontal and vertical lines of Bridge into a freestanding, three-dimensional mapping of the internal volumes of the body. Together these works propose that we consider the body less as an object and more as a site and agent of transformation. In the main gallery, the artist’s exploration of the potential of the ‘mapping’ of body space continues with boldly physical sculptures that increase the dynamic between space and mass. Visitors will encounter five new monumental works from Gormley’s recent ‘Big Beamer’ series. These previously unexhibited works deconstruct and reassemble the interior volume of the body through interlocking steel beams that run in all three axes. Created at one-and-a-half-times life-size, they represent a body in five unstable moments of rest—from crouching to fully erect. In spite of their grand scale, the works remain remarkably playful. Continue Reading..