Antony Gormley

Salvatore Ala Gallery, New York

Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above in 1984)

Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, Part II, 7 May 1992, Lot 148

Galleria Caroline + Salvatore Ala, Milan

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

New York, Salvatore Ala Gallery, Antony Gormley: New Sculpture, 1984, p. 303, illustrated

Milan, Salvatore + Caroline Ala, Collettiva, 2007

Milan, Salvatore + Caroline Ala, Antony Gormley: Mind, 2009

Lugano, Musei d'Arte e Villa Ciani, Corpo-Automi-Robot, Tra Arte, Scienza e Tecnologia, 2009-10, p. 303, illustrated

Michael Mack, Ed., Antony Gormley, Göttingen 2007, p. 504, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The surface irregularities are in keeping with the artist's practice and choice of media.
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Created in 1984, in the years when Antony Gormley first began to use his body as tool, material and subject for his sculpture, Fill is a highly significant example of the lead body case works that mark the beginning of a lifelong exploration of the body as a site of transformation. The present work challenges the viewer to consider her space in space at large and the potential of human consciousness to be filled by that which is beyond the bounding condition of the skin. Fill lies flat on the ground but attempts to communicate the feeling of floating free.

Gormley’s early lead 'body case' works are a radical reclamation of the human form for a sculpture that does not seek to describe a particular body, or use the body to enforce ideology or expression, but to treat it as a place. The series of which Fill is a part marks the beginning of Gormley’s decades long experiment with exploring the body as a site rather than an object and making ‘the darkness of the body’ visible. Despite the mimetic appearance of these lead body cases, they are not representations of his body but cases around a space which he - a particular example of a human being - once occupied and that by implication anyone could occupy. These works call upon our empathy and the viewer’s ability to imaginatively occupy the dark spaces that they enclose.

Each of Gormley’s works start with a real event, the moulding of his body in plaster which is the truth claim of the work. The artist explains: "I adopt the position which I have selected for a sculpture and am wrapped in scrim (…) and plaster. Because the plaster dries quickly, within ten minutes, the work is divided in different sections (…) The whole process takes about an hour, perhaps an hour and a half. Then I am cut out of my mould and it is reassembled. You are aware that there is a transition, that something that is happening within you is gradually registering externally (…) I concentrate very hard on maintaining my position and the form comes from this concentration" (The artist, 2010). Once cut away each section of plaster is reinforced with fiberglass before lead sheet is hand beaten over the contours of the body and finally welded together into one form.

The lead skin of these works and Fill in particular are a hermetic reinforcement of the limit of body which Gormley constantly wishes to connect to the perceptual limit of the horizon and the potential extension of mind. There are two important three-part early lead works, Three Ways: Mould Hole and Passage (1981-82, kept in the Tate Collection) and Land Sea Air II (1982) which focus on the orifices of the body as thresholds of perception. Fill continues this exploration and along with works like Untitled (For Francis) (1986, Tate Collection) and Desert (For Walter) (1983) attempts to reconcile the deep space of imagination with the perception of the infinity of great distance or the openness of the sky. The fundamental question, as asked by St Augustine in his Confessions (400AD), of how it is that the condition of incarnation can be filled with the immensity of imagination, is precisely that which Fill attempts to embody.