Antony Gormley

Burnett Miller Gallery, Los Angeles
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

San Diego, Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, American Field, 1993

Michael Mack, Ed., Antony Gormley, Göttingen 2007, p. 509, illustrated in colour

The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the illustration fails to convey fully the three-dimensional nature of the original. This work is in very good condition.
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"My work is to make bodies into vessels that both contain and occupy space. Space exists outside the door and inside my head. My work is to make a human space in space".

The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Antony Gormley: Five Works, 1987

Initiated in 1987 and completed two years later, Contact is one of the earliest sculptures by Antony Gormley ever to be offered for public sale, and is paradigmatic of the unique lead sculptures of the 1980s that prefigured and foresaw much of his subsequent manifestations of the human form cast in iron editions. It is an early manifestation of Gormley's intellectual engagement in trying to understand the world in which we live and our place within it. The sculpture, moulded on the artist's own body and thus on a scale with which the viewer can immediately identify, presents itself as a stimulus for contemplation as to the universal question of man's purpose and place in this world. "If my subject is being," Gormley explained, "somehow I have to manage to engage the whole being of the viewer" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Liverpool, Tate, Antony Gormley, 1994). In this work he focuses on the physical reality of being and the boundless internal space of the mind, the openings of the finger tips uniting the internal and external space of the figure, as well representing spiritual and somatic versions of existence. With these apertures, Contact suggests not only the dematerialization of physical form, which has become such an important theme in the artist's later work, but also the idea of presence through absence and the conceptual deconstruction of space itself.

Antony Gormley strives to capture the essence of existence, exploring the dichotomy between the materiality of the earthly body and its imaginative and spiritual potential. Contact exemplifies much of Gormley's best work, including the idea of the human body as place rather than object; the relationship between mass and space; and concepts of mutable forms and changing physical identities. His art is informed by a deep understanding of Eastern and Western spiritualities, and Contact manifests his investigation into the relationship between the physical body and the realm of consciousness. Whilst inhabiting a form with which the viewer can associate, the figure is non-representational in terms of expression and values, thus transcending the limitations of language. "The body is a language before language. When made still in sculpture it can be a witness to life and it can talk about this time now." (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Kolnischer, Kunstverein, Total Strangers, 1999)

Gormley's output, which has been celebrated in retrospective exhibitions from the Hayward Gallery, Tate Liverpool, the Malmö Konsthall, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and additionally earned him the 1994 Turner Prize, has "revitalised the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation" (Exhibition Catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery, Antony Gormley: Blind Light, 2007, dustjacket). Much of Gormley's oeuvre portrays the sense of being; his work explores the felt experience of existing as a body in the world. Here the artist freezes space and time by enclosing the shape of his body at its current position and moment, imprisoning that "present time" in a cloak consisting of the pure element of lead. The concept of the figure being permanently fixed also evokes the artist's personal experience of suffering acute claustrophobia as a child, which he taught himself to conquer: "I started training myself by going backwards in my bed, forcing myself between quite tightly hospital-cornered bedclothes in the dormitory and lying with my feet on the pillow and my head down the bottom and saying to myself I must not panic" (the artist cited in: Lynn Barber, 'Body of work', The Observer, Sunday 9 March 2008). His work forces us to stop and sense what it feels like to be a person; he treats the figure not as an object to sculpt but as a presence to capture. He explains: "I want to confront existence ... The optical and the conceptual have dominated in the art of the twentieth century and I turn to the body in an attempt to find a language that will transcend the limitations of race, creed and language, but which will still be about the rootedness of identity" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Liverpool, Tate, Antony Gormley, 1993, p. 49).