Body As Building: A Conversation with Antony Gormley

For more than four decades, Antony Gormley has consistently shifted sculpture away from the object and toward experience. “What Holds Us,” his current exhibition at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, Italy, continues the evolution of this enquiry into sculpture as space-making with works that underscore the distinction between appearance and experience, exploring ideas of interiority and the possibility that matter might somehow carry consciousness, memory, and spirit.

These concerns increasingly draw Gormley’s work toward architecture, which he calls a “second body” on which the living body depends. In works such as Innercity (2026), the distinction between sculpture and architecture begins to collapse. Bodies become buildings; buildings become bodies as visitors enter and navigate the interiors of sculptures in which space ceases to be a backdrop and becomes the work itself.

Against an increasingly virtual culture, these works return us to weight, gravity, touch, and scale. Their materials—ordinary stone, terracotta, iron, and cardboard—become charged with unexpected emotional resonance. Whether encountered indoors or out, Gormley’s sculptures function as instruments of awareness, inviting us to engage not simply with form but with our own embodied experience.

Rajesh Punj: When I see the body, I typically consider its outer skin and inner organs, yet in your work, I see the body as weight, mass, and volume.
Antony Gormley: Whether you’re talking about a body-case or a body-form—any object or body in space—appearance is the result of light falling on the surface, the bounding condition of a body or a building. The sight of something is revealed by light. But the minute you ask, “What is displaced by that surface, what lies on the other side of what something looks like?” you have no choice but to go inside. In Pallavan, Chola, Mathura, and Khmer art, that is indicated by pneuma, or breath, the idea of a certain inflation of the surface, which suggests there is an inner pressure. The recognition inherent in that tradition, particularly when carried by the mass of a stone sculpture, that surface or superficial appearance is insufficient to carry the inner spirit or condition of a body, I find really powerful. I recently spent three weeks in Sumatra, Java, and Bali, looking at Buddhist and Hindu temple precincts and some sculpture. There was a Prajnaparamita at Candi Gumpung outside Jambi in southern Sumatra, a 13th-century Buddhist monastic site that expresses exactly what I’m talking about—a sense of inner breath.

In the works I’m showing in San Gimignano, I’m very interested in how you can totally ignore the representation of the body and still give a sense of this internal condition, or internal breath. The dialogue between the three volcanic basalt pieces and the cardboard Innercity tries to set up a dialogue between mass and space that runs from the most archaic and earthy of materials to the most modern and impermanent. In the first room, I’m trying to talk about the dependence of the living body on the second body—architecture and the made environment, the habitat that our species has found necessary to make. Then, in Innercity, I’m saying that yes, there is a way of getting inside sculpture. In the work’s 15 body-buildings, there is an invitation to enter physically. Once inside, you recognize that the external look of the thing leaves you unprepared for the experience of the internal volumes, even though they are separated by only 25 millimeters of laminated cardboard. The inside is a plethora of extensions and continuations of orthogonal space illuminated by light often coming from an indirect source.

You could say this is an empirical object lesson on the distinctions between internal and external reality, but I hope it’s more than that. The proposition or invitation of my works has always been to inhabit the space that they displace. I imagine a kind of empathic inhabitation. The basalt works are very crude. They have no limbs, there is no attempt at likeness, but they express an attitude in the set of the body. That is something that you can feel, because they come from a lived moment of human time. They come from the registration of me leaning on and being supported by a wall. I made them purposefully, knowing that they were going to go into this ground-floor space of a 14th-century building. Despite the crudeness of the stacked blocks, people can recognize—without the conscious mind, through muscle memory—how it feels to stand like that; furthermore, they can identify the feeling of dependency, vulnerability, uncertainty, or loitering that the works carry.

In contradistinction, the invitation of Innercity is to move through its field. It’s a landscape made of boxes, of orthogonal volumes stacked one on top of the other. You probably don’t notice at first that they are bodies. You can work hard and see that they are bodies, all perforated and made porous, opened to space. And the invitation is, as you get more and more stuck, that it’s easier to move through the bodies than between them, because it is a kind of labyrinth and you might come down a dead end. In exploring those interiors bodily, you have to completely alter the unwritten laws of decorum in terms of how to engage with art in a gallery. You have to get down and crawl or kneel, or at any rate bend very low. You must use your body as a receptor, as a perceiver, an engager in space and time, rather than your conscious mind (even though you might use that, too).

My hope is that in the diminishment of scale and the encouragement to behave in a child-like way, you may be enchanted by the ability of sculpture and architecture to play with space. The works of Innercity are of a scale chosen to resonate within a place of spectacle. The gallery was an opera house that became a cinema, a place where a passive public looked at and listened to the active drama. With the installation of Innercity, the passive space of the stalls becomes an arena for first-hand physical investigation. By going inside on your knees, you return to the position of an animal or child. So, we go back a step or two in our evolutionary history; we are invited to look at these spaces, not trying to find representation or story, but to feel what they feel like: how the volumes either extend or invite an anticipation of the place around the corner or the light at the end of the tunnel.

I am hoping that this does two things. First, it allows us to dream with our eyes open, to feel our own embodiment, our own vitality within the vessel of our bodies. This should re-enchant us with the poetic potential of architecture through the way that it deals with light and the variation of volume. Second, it allows us to detach from representation per se and enter a dimensionless space. You may well ask what I’m talking about since this is clearly a cheap, lightweight cardboard environment. But its very precarity, the acceptance that it is by nature a provisional proposition, allows one to treat the experience as an instrument for a certain kind of imaginative enchantment. I hope that people will sit awhile, lie down, and sense these spaces for what they are, taking in how light enters indirectly, how volumes that we can’t necessarily relate to what we have seen on the outside interrupt or complicate the internal forms, how our muscle memory has been trained by the mind-muscle of a furnished room to treat a 43-centimeter-high surface as somewhere to sit, even if it’s a shelf on a mountainous cliff.

All those reactions to scale within our furnished lives are denied at a scale that is super large for a model, and here is a model that we are invited to enter. Through the scale of these bodies, which are also buildings, we can begin to detach interiority from functionality and perhaps begin to see these interiors as simply places of possibility. This is an antidote to Corbusier’s notion that architecture is a “machine for living.” I think that architecture is a mood manifester and a mood extender, as well as a mood maker. It works directly on your limbic sense and can reinforce well-being, but that part of its power has been suppressed by cost-benefit analysis, which reduces architecture its participation in the late-capitalist exploitation of human need.

RP: Isn’t architecture in some ways a burden on the body, because of how we have to navigate through its spaces?
AG: But it shouldn’t be, should it? A colonnaded corridor is no longer about the boring thing of having to go from point A to point B. The spatial interval isn’t dissimilar from the beat or rhythm of music, and if it is in harmony with the body, it suddenly makes the journey from here to there into a movement not unlike the intervals of a Bach partita. You perform that movement not simply for the boring business of mechanically moving a body of 85 kilos from this position to that position, but as an amplified expression of vitality.

Good architecture emphasizes and enriches the whole experience of moving through space and time. That’s something that Brunelleschi understood, that all great architects understood, among them Borromini, Michelangelo, and today, Chipperfield and SANAA. The truth is that we have given up expecting too much from architecture and have accepted that living in boxes is our condition, so long as we have our internet connection and are kept dry and warm. But that denies the potential of architecture to be freeing of the spirit. Maybe it is strange to have a sculptor talking about architecture, because the common understanding of a sculptor’s job is to make objects that occupy space in a meaningful way. I’ve always worried about that. I never wanted the work to colonize space. I’ve always wanted it to activate space, and to acknowledge that the space displaced by the object is in intimate dialogue with the space in which it finds itself, whether elemental or architectural.

RP: I recall Richard Serra highlighting the significance of space, how it wasn’t about the work, it was about the space itself. What is space, and what is the sculpture?
AG: That is what sculpture is. Sculpture is the articulation of and the instrument through which our spatial experience is made apparent to us, made conscious and felt. Yes, people consider that sculpture is about things. But I don’t think it is. It’s about experience. Rather than trying to colonize or occupy space, it tries to activate it in a way that makes the experience of space more present and engaged. The subject of sculpture is space-making. You could say that this is the job of architecture, but I would say it’s the job of both, and they are mutually supportive. It’s not surprising that when Brunelleschi takes up Donatello’s challenge, we find that he is as great a sculptor as he is an architect, and equally, we find that Michelangelo is as great an architect as he is a sculptor.

RP: There’s something incredible in how you talk about the ephemeral and the emotional in the context of stone blocks, which are of undeniable weight and mass. How do you manage to find the emotional in them?
AG: I’m surprised myself, because I didn’t know whether it would work. I’ve been playing around with this “Blockwork” language for a long time now, trying to simplify it more and more. But I’ve never allowed the stoniness of stone to speak so clearly as in these three leaning pieces. They are brutal and crude, and yet everything matters. Every single coaxial face or slightly shifted one is working to communicate the attitude, the inherent set of the body. Though I don’t identify the emotions in the work very often, one of them looks like a monument, but in fact expresses uncertainty and a certain degree of terror. And another one is at the Wailing Wall.

Normally, I don’t want to use sculpture to illustrate things; I want to allow viewers to find their own response. But it was shocking to me how immediately clear the feeling became. There were two things that were entirely experimental: we hadn’t used basalt in this way before, and we hadn’t worked in stone at this scale before. I was stopped in my tracks by the embedded emotion in the work. Downstairs, the terra-cotta double works explore the same thing: how unbelievably crude masses—huge slabs, 140 millimeters thick—can carry emotion. Why should they be able to carry emotion? Carl Andre uses brick, but he uses it to say, “This is our condition. We live in an organized world in which we have exploited natural materials to make formal choices. Here are some pre-ordained arrangements of bricks, either along headers or stringers.” I am allowing the clay to carry feelings of vulnerability and closeness.

RP: Andre isn’t someone who comes to mind when I think of the emotional.
AG: His work does have emotion, a calm acceptance of what is, but it’s very Puritan and tight. I’m trying to say, “Carl, you may not be here anymore, but I’m taking your bricks, and I’m making them feel, I’m making them touch us. You allowed us to walk on your work, inviting us to think that we could be the subject of art, denying the plinth, denying all the hierarchies of power and any kind of representation.” I have literally wanted people to get inside my work, both empathetically and physically. I want to talk about human vulnerability, precarity, all of those things. Curiously, the clumsiness is the very thing that makes it effective.

RP: The terra-cotta works make me think of India, specifically of Haridwar and the river Ganges, where there are countless burial sites, evoking the cycle of life, of birth, death, and rebirth. Are your choices of materials meant to be evocative for the viewer?
AG: On one hand, I’m trying to re-enchant and reactivate our sense of architecture; on the other, I’m trying to use the materials that we have built our second body out of through time. The exhibition starts with stone, and we go on to terracotta, then to iron, and we finish with cardboard. They’re all very familiar to us. You could say that the brick is the first pixel. It is the first part-whole relationship that gives us the city, which is the materialization of the collective body. But we have become blind to the fact that the iconic forms and materials of our cities—the high-rise, the glinting glass, steel, and concrete—are also representations of our desires and fears. I want to take these materials, common and crude though they are, and make them speak to our inner selves, using them in a way that allows the silence and stillness of sculpture to act on our inner selves. Maybe those are the bits of us that hide because they are uncertain. I hope that sculpture can allow them to be felt, that’s the job that sculpture can do.

“What Holds Us” is on view at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, Italy, through September 13, 2026. “Geestgrond,” a major exhibition of Gormley’s sculptures and installations, remains on view at KMSKA, Antwerp, Belgium, through September 20, 2026.