Exhibition Review:
Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková
Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková
In lead, plaster cast, crude oil, clay, steel, inks, or bread, Antony Gormley is a sculptor. In this new collaborative exhibition with poet and architect Pavla Melková, Gormley’s faintly anthropological fascination with the human form and forms of humanity is entangled with Melková’s words and sustained across seven rooms in the Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague.
After passing through Rudolfinum’s grand neo-Renaissance interior–with its decorative cornices of dancing fawns and silk-draped nudes–on entering the first room of Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková, there is an immediate shedding of cultural weight and a feeling of a return to something that is straightforwardly grounded at a cruder, more base human level. Arranged sparsely on the walls are sets of Gormley’s sketches and ink paintings. They have a rawness in their inconsistent page sizes, formats, and torn edges. Pinned under glass, it's as if the loose leaves were specimens gathered from an abundant mass of similar works stacked in Gormley’s studio draws. Each one looks to be a modest strategy for working something out; some appear concerned with modelling scale and form, others look more like rituals to liberate uncertain ideas. Around Gormley’s works, running down the walls and pushing across the corners of the room, are graceful lines clipped from Melková’s poetry in their original Czech and in English translation.
In the second room, titled “Encircling”, is Gormley’s site-specific installation Orbit Field (2024). The installation insists on visitors being alert as they move under and around metres high interlocking aluminium rings that run the length of the room. They look like trails from lines of flight that should be traced in the air with a finger. Orbit Field gives architectural depth to the previous room’s flat drawings whose only relief is the scarred and welted paper they are drawn on. Despite the shift in scale and contrasting precision of hard aluminium to bleeding inks, Orbit Field doesn't leave behind the oblique wonder from the first room. Rather, it delivers the visitor into a different register of a similar experience in which they are part of the sculpture's becoming rather than a mere observer of artefact. Orbit Field is what it welcomes to be done, as such, more a situation than a thing.
There are more excerpts of poems and sketches in the room that follows. Like the first and the fifth rooms, it is titled “Permeating”. The few lines of text are like marginalia worked around each set of Gormley’s drawings. Melková’s words do not describe Gormley’s works, though, neither do Gormley’s works illustrate Melková’s poems. They do, however, share common themes of interest, there is a resonant energy that draws them towards each other but they ultimately remain separate, independent, unique. This is most pronounced, and most literal, in the exhibition title. The slash between their names describes a connection by difference, it brings two distinct things close but ultimately holds them apart. Similarly, when their works appear to be at their closest, which is to say, when the gap between them seems so narrow that they could share the same vision, the same intent, this is when their essential differences are most apparent. Seeing Gormely’s gestural marks, for instance, and reading next to them of the “living tissue of memory” or of “lightness to weight”, there is a fundamental resistance, a repulsion, amplified by their closeness that can be felt at these moments. This is the contrast between the allure of Gormley's drawings in their hazy ineffability, and the appeal of Melková’s poems in their crisp articulation.
Melvoká is literally bringing language to Gormley’s work. Unlike the Buddhistic, spiritualist language that Gormley might return to in interview, Melvoká’s form is an earthen, self-possessed poetry. It works because it does not have to be faithful to Gormley’s work, instead, it plucks at it and by association appears to weave into its blatant intertextuality. As such, the relationship between the poetry and the sketches–and the rest of the exhibition more generally–seems frankly, and non-pejoratively, incidental. It’s akin to the way patterns can be derived from nature in land art, or how music can be heard from a motionless orchestra. This kind of open-ended relationship between work and world is not new to Gormley. Rarely feeling like surplus, what is incidental often gains a welcome sense of place in his works.
For instance, it can be seen in the material form of the thousands of irregular terracotta figures in Gormley’s Field (1991). It’s also the performative crux of Gormley’s One & Other (2009) where members of the public could volunteer to occupy–in their own unique ways–the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. Other times, the incidental emerges through circumstance, such as the politics of place in Sculpture for Derry Walls (1987). It’s a set of three pairs of iron cruciform figures, each pair joined back to back. One figure looks into the walled city of Derry, Northern Ireland, the other looks out. During the first night after being installed, one of the sculptures had burning tires hung around its neck. By morning, the molten rubber had hardened across its shoulders and chest, the wires from the tyres left a crown of stray, twisted cords on the figure's head; a new sculpture was formed, darkly. Because Gormley’s works remain open to the gross reality of life, they are able to give place to and amplify these sorts of incidental qualities. It is not a strain to see this happening in Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková.
Inline with this mode of heightened sensory awareness and an alertness to the incidental, Galerie Rudolfinum does not escape being metabolised into Gormley’s complex sculptural ecology. For instance, before entering the fourth room, something curiously artful can be found in the utilitarian diagram that maps the route for wheelchairs through the previous room’s Orbit Field. Similarly, the language of the perfunctory safety notice leading up to the fourth room takes on a different weight: “You are about to enter a dark corridor with two turns, followed by a large room. You will exit through another dark corridor on the other side of the room.” It seems, concretely, that Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková is making the gallery a zone of encounters. Inside the fourth room is a glowing nest of orthogonal frames titled Breathing Room IV [Rio] (2012). It fades, almost imperceptibly, in and out. It has no certain colour but instead a luminous trace of unstable tints, it’s a living drawing. Disoriented in the dark, away from squeaking parquet floors, this is the most lucid and meditative of the rooms.
Room five is the last room to combine cuts of Melková’s poems and sets of Gormley’s drawings. Gormley and Melková have worked together before this exhibition on The Gravitational Field of the Inexpressible. It is a 2022 book publication that collects Melková’s poems and reproduces Gormley’s varied drawings from 2007 to 2019. It leads with a brief philosophical introduction that makes explicit, but does not exhaust, the inferred value of their works. Melková argues that only art is able to surpass the boundaries of proof and reason that constrain science and philosophy and this is how it is capable of opening and expanding our abilities to perceive, sense, and experience. The introductory pages are written in a more direct, academic tone but they share the same living spirit as the poems. Each chapter begins with a poem by Melková and ends with a series of Gormley’s sketches. The titles of the chapters are repeated in the names of the rooms in Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková: Directing, Encircling, Overlapping, Intersecting, Permeating. It seems as if The Gravitational Field of the Inexpressible has worked in some ways as a preliminary dialogue and early blueprint for this exhibition.
Gormley’s most common referent is the human body, Expansion Stations (2014) in the sixth room returns to this with five standing, hunched, steel sculptures. In line, down the centre of the room, the blocky but recognisably-human forms each echo the previous as they iteratively extend out further into the space and themselves. As their volume increases the resolution of the bodily form distorts and previously imperceptible characteristics of the material become more visible; the purple-blueing oxidation of the steel, the slugs of welding, and so on. Co-ordinate VIII (2024), in the final room, is probably one of the more complex sculptures and, due to it being so understated, is most likely to be passed by (or under) at the end of the exhibition. Appearing as if it were under high tension, a thin steel bar runs across the room from wall to adjacent wall, and another runs vertically from floor to ceiling. It looks like the room has been speared by profoundly absolute axes. Each bar is far enough apart that they can not simultaneously be focused on, so they can not be said to intersect in any definite way as lines, or even as planes in a possibly alternative dimension. As such, their “point” can only be hazarded as a rough approximation. Thematically, and architecturally in the gallery, the seventh room returns the visitor–in a strange but not awkward logic–back to the first.
It's been thirty years since Gormley won the Turner Prize. With no sense of being a calloused routine, his works hold fast to the same hard to express but intuitively comprehensible, multiplicitous theme of the body. This collaborative exhibition with Pavla Melková is testament to the vim of co-creation that has always thrived in Gormley’s work and which has become a challenging staple of contemporary art. Much less an exhibition of things, Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková is a journeying succession of experiences, sheltered in the Galerie Rudolfinum, where visitors are urged to act out in the poetic condition of wonder.
After passing through Rudolfinum’s grand neo-Renaissance interior–with its decorative cornices of dancing fawns and silk-draped nudes–on entering the first room of Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková, there is an immediate shedding of cultural weight and a feeling of a return to something that is straightforwardly grounded at a cruder, more base human level. Arranged sparsely on the walls are sets of Gormley’s sketches and ink paintings. They have a rawness in their inconsistent page sizes, formats, and torn edges. Pinned under glass, it's as if the loose leaves were specimens gathered from an abundant mass of similar works stacked in Gormley’s studio draws. Each one looks to be a modest strategy for working something out; some appear concerned with modelling scale and form, others look more like rituals to liberate uncertain ideas. Around Gormley’s works, running down the walls and pushing across the corners of the room, are graceful lines clipped from Melková’s poetry in their original Czech and in English translation.
In the second room, titled “Encircling”, is Gormley’s site-specific installation Orbit Field (2024). The installation insists on visitors being alert as they move under and around metres high interlocking aluminium rings that run the length of the room. They look like trails from lines of flight that should be traced in the air with a finger. Orbit Field gives architectural depth to the previous room’s flat drawings whose only relief is the scarred and welted paper they are drawn on. Despite the shift in scale and contrasting precision of hard aluminium to bleeding inks, Orbit Field doesn't leave behind the oblique wonder from the first room. Rather, it delivers the visitor into a different register of a similar experience in which they are part of the sculpture's becoming rather than a mere observer of artefact. Orbit Field is what it welcomes to be done, as such, more a situation than a thing.
There are more excerpts of poems and sketches in the room that follows. Like the first and the fifth rooms, it is titled “Permeating”. The few lines of text are like marginalia worked around each set of Gormley’s drawings. Melková’s words do not describe Gormley’s works, though, neither do Gormley’s works illustrate Melková’s poems. They do, however, share common themes of interest, there is a resonant energy that draws them towards each other but they ultimately remain separate, independent, unique. This is most pronounced, and most literal, in the exhibition title. The slash between their names describes a connection by difference, it brings two distinct things close but ultimately holds them apart. Similarly, when their works appear to be at their closest, which is to say, when the gap between them seems so narrow that they could share the same vision, the same intent, this is when their essential differences are most apparent. Seeing Gormely’s gestural marks, for instance, and reading next to them of the “living tissue of memory” or of “lightness to weight”, there is a fundamental resistance, a repulsion, amplified by their closeness that can be felt at these moments. This is the contrast between the allure of Gormley's drawings in their hazy ineffability, and the appeal of Melková’s poems in their crisp articulation.
Melvoká is literally bringing language to Gormley’s work. Unlike the Buddhistic, spiritualist language that Gormley might return to in interview, Melvoká’s form is an earthen, self-possessed poetry. It works because it does not have to be faithful to Gormley’s work, instead, it plucks at it and by association appears to weave into its blatant intertextuality. As such, the relationship between the poetry and the sketches–and the rest of the exhibition more generally–seems frankly, and non-pejoratively, incidental. It’s akin to the way patterns can be derived from nature in land art, or how music can be heard from a motionless orchestra. This kind of open-ended relationship between work and world is not new to Gormley. Rarely feeling like surplus, what is incidental often gains a welcome sense of place in his works.
For instance, it can be seen in the material form of the thousands of irregular terracotta figures in Gormley’s Field (1991). It’s also the performative crux of Gormley’s One & Other (2009) where members of the public could volunteer to occupy–in their own unique ways–the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. Other times, the incidental emerges through circumstance, such as the politics of place in Sculpture for Derry Walls (1987). It’s a set of three pairs of iron cruciform figures, each pair joined back to back. One figure looks into the walled city of Derry, Northern Ireland, the other looks out. During the first night after being installed, one of the sculptures had burning tires hung around its neck. By morning, the molten rubber had hardened across its shoulders and chest, the wires from the tyres left a crown of stray, twisted cords on the figure's head; a new sculpture was formed, darkly. Because Gormley’s works remain open to the gross reality of life, they are able to give place to and amplify these sorts of incidental qualities. It is not a strain to see this happening in Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková.
Inline with this mode of heightened sensory awareness and an alertness to the incidental, Galerie Rudolfinum does not escape being metabolised into Gormley’s complex sculptural ecology. For instance, before entering the fourth room, something curiously artful can be found in the utilitarian diagram that maps the route for wheelchairs through the previous room’s Orbit Field. Similarly, the language of the perfunctory safety notice leading up to the fourth room takes on a different weight: “You are about to enter a dark corridor with two turns, followed by a large room. You will exit through another dark corridor on the other side of the room.” It seems, concretely, that Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková is making the gallery a zone of encounters. Inside the fourth room is a glowing nest of orthogonal frames titled Breathing Room IV [Rio] (2012). It fades, almost imperceptibly, in and out. It has no certain colour but instead a luminous trace of unstable tints, it’s a living drawing. Disoriented in the dark, away from squeaking parquet floors, this is the most lucid and meditative of the rooms.
Room five is the last room to combine cuts of Melková’s poems and sets of Gormley’s drawings. Gormley and Melková have worked together before this exhibition on The Gravitational Field of the Inexpressible. It is a 2022 book publication that collects Melková’s poems and reproduces Gormley’s varied drawings from 2007 to 2019. It leads with a brief philosophical introduction that makes explicit, but does not exhaust, the inferred value of their works. Melková argues that only art is able to surpass the boundaries of proof and reason that constrain science and philosophy and this is how it is capable of opening and expanding our abilities to perceive, sense, and experience. The introductory pages are written in a more direct, academic tone but they share the same living spirit as the poems. Each chapter begins with a poem by Melková and ends with a series of Gormley’s sketches. The titles of the chapters are repeated in the names of the rooms in Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková: Directing, Encircling, Overlapping, Intersecting, Permeating. It seems as if The Gravitational Field of the Inexpressible has worked in some ways as a preliminary dialogue and early blueprint for this exhibition.
Gormley’s most common referent is the human body, Expansion Stations (2014) in the sixth room returns to this with five standing, hunched, steel sculptures. In line, down the centre of the room, the blocky but recognisably-human forms each echo the previous as they iteratively extend out further into the space and themselves. As their volume increases the resolution of the bodily form distorts and previously imperceptible characteristics of the material become more visible; the purple-blueing oxidation of the steel, the slugs of welding, and so on. Co-ordinate VIII (2024), in the final room, is probably one of the more complex sculptures and, due to it being so understated, is most likely to be passed by (or under) at the end of the exhibition. Appearing as if it were under high tension, a thin steel bar runs across the room from wall to adjacent wall, and another runs vertically from floor to ceiling. It looks like the room has been speared by profoundly absolute axes. Each bar is far enough apart that they can not simultaneously be focused on, so they can not be said to intersect in any definite way as lines, or even as planes in a possibly alternative dimension. As such, their “point” can only be hazarded as a rough approximation. Thematically, and architecturally in the gallery, the seventh room returns the visitor–in a strange but not awkward logic–back to the first.
It's been thirty years since Gormley won the Turner Prize. With no sense of being a calloused routine, his works hold fast to the same hard to express but intuitively comprehensible, multiplicitous theme of the body. This collaborative exhibition with Pavla Melková is testament to the vim of co-creation that has always thrived in Gormley’s work and which has become a challenging staple of contemporary art. Much less an exhibition of things, Antony Gormley / Pavla Melková is a journeying succession of experiences, sheltered in the Galerie Rudolfinum, where visitors are urged to act out in the poetic condition of wonder.
Images courtesy of Galerie Rudolfinum. Photos by Ondřej Polák.
