Antony Gormley

The exhibition Antony Gormley. Bodies in Space at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin takes place in connection with this year’s award of the Bernhard Heiliger Prize for Sculpture and is accompanied by the exhibition Feeling Material in the Kunst-Raum des Deutschen Bundestages in the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus. The Bernhard Heiliger Prize for Sculpture, which is awarded every four years by an independent jury and established by the Bernhard Heiliger Foundation in 1996, serves to honor a sculptural work that has a lasting substance independent of the fashions of the art market and has made a significant contribution to sculpture or the concept of sculpture. It is neither a promotional prize nor an award for young artists and is primarily intended to stimulate discussion about the spectrum and possibilities of sculpture and to bring it to the public. To date, Bertrand Lavier (1999) and Fritz Schwegler (2003) have been awarded the Bernhard Heiliger Prize for Sculpture.

The British sculptor Antony Gormley, born in London in 1950, is now the third winner of the Bernhard Heiliger Prize for Sculpture, which was awarded to him on September 15 in the Marie-Elisabeth Lüders House of the German Bundestag.

The selection of works for the award-winning exhibition at the Georg-Kolbe-Museum was made by the artist himself. The sequence of rooms allowed him to illustrate an essential theme of his oeuvre: The transformation of the body into sculptural matter and its increasing dematerialization. Since 1980, Antony Gormley has been working with moulds of his own body, which he treats both as a sculptural material and as a medium for spatial and somatic sensitizations. A recurring starting point is the question of how it feels to be both a body and in a body, which Gormley seeks to make clear not only in its form, but as a vessel or abode of consciousness. It is a real mistake to reduce Gormley to figuration as a way of representing the human body. In fact, he treats the casts of his own body and the series of materials developed from them in an enchanting way as spatial catalysts. In other words, as representatives or doppelgangers of the body being viewed, in order to enable the immediate mediation of distances, proportions and sizes in the space structured by the artworks.