{"id":8207,"date":"2025-06-02T12:44:48","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T12:44:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/06\/02\/whats-on-antony-gormley-richard-hunt-and-rafal-zajko-in-london\/"},"modified":"2025-06-02T12:45:04","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T12:45:04","slug":"whats-on-antony-gormley-richard-hunt-and-rafal-zajko-in-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/06\/02\/whats-on-antony-gormley-richard-hunt-and-rafal-zajko-in-london\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s On: Antony Gormley, Richard Hunt and Rafa\u0142 Zajko in London"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Antony Gormley, HOME AND THE WORLD II<\/em>, 1986-96; Lead, fibreglass, plaster, steel and air, 192 x 548.5 x 57 cm. Photograph by Stephen White & Co.\u00a9 the artist<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first thing that comes to mind when looking at Anthony Gormley\u2019s As Above So Below I<\/i> (1986), a drawing with oil and charcoal that\u2019s part of \u201cWitness\u201d at White Cube Mason\u2019s Yard is, naturally, da Vinci. Gormley\u2019s drawing of a human form with outstretched, angular limbs feels like an echo of da Vinci\u2019s Vitruvian Man <\/i>(1490). But where da Vinci\u2019s drawing, inspired by the writing of a Roman architect, is designed to let the artist explore what he considered to be ideal human proportions, Gormley\u2019s work is stranger, more uncanny. The figures in As Above So Below<\/i> are flipped; what seems at first glance to be a face appears not just at the top of the image, but in the middle, where the hips and groins of these two figures are joined. One figure has its arms fully extended, while the other is angular. There\u2019s nothing ideal about this overlaying of bodies, and at times, it barely even feels human.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s this relationship to humanity, which isn\u2019t a complete lack, but instead a kind of gradual letting go of it, a gesture towards whatever might lie beyond our current, fleshy forms, that animates \u201cWitness,\u201d alongside several other recent exhibitions of sculpture in London and beyond. In one room of White Cube Mason\u2019s Yard are a series of Gormley\u2019s vast, lead sculptures; all apart from each other, like a group of people frozen in a moment of conflict. But more than that, none of them are looking at each other, and some seem to be further away from the memory of human forms than others. In one corner of the room is Witness II<\/i> (1993), a figure sitting with its arms folded and head down, buried beneath heavy limbs; in the centre of the room is Home and the World II<\/i> (1986-96), a human, or at least human-adjacent, figure standing tall, frozen in motion. But atop their neck isn\u2019t a head but a vast structure, what looks like a letterbox, and seems to be longer than the figure itself is tall. These two, sharing space with other lead figures, seem to capture some kind of trajectory\u2014an idea of what might become of the human form, and how difficult it would be for us to acknowledge or even simply comprehend it. Seeds II<\/i> (1989\/93) is a series of lead fragments that look like a pile of bullets, but the name of the piece implies something else: that this material, which is the source of life for Gormley\u2019s structures, is also the genesis of some new, strange form that is at once human and something beyond it. The emphasis here is on the weight of it; the heavy materiality of a physical form. This feels echoed in the sculptures of Ivana Ba\u0161i\u0107, in the recent show \u201cTemptations of Being\u201d at Albion Jeune. In Hypostasis<\/i> (2024), a blown glass, dust-covered sculpture reminiscent of the eggs and birthing pods that appear throughout science fiction (perhaps most famously in The Matrix<\/i>), a race-car exhaust hose lingers inside the glass, the genesis of what feels like a living thing and almost certainly not human. It\u2019s even tempting to draw a line from the lead of Gormley\u2019s Seeds<\/i> to the exhaust hose that lingers inside Hypostasis<\/i>, these deeply artificial materials creating a new, synthetic life form that is both flesh and not.<\/p>\n

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SEE ALSO: Guglielmo Castelli Explores Longing and Theatricality in His S\u00e3o Paulo Debut <\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In White Cube\u2019s other space, in Bermondsey, another sculptural retrospective pushes against the limits of what might become of the human form. The most dynamic, surprising aspects of \u201cMetamorphosis \u2013 A Retrospective,\u201d a decades-spanning showing of work by Richard Hunt, are those that capture most viscerally that feeling of being in-between; something that feels both human and not, excavated from history but somehow still pointing toward an imagined future. Hero\u2019s Head<\/i> (1956), a sculpture of what, at first glance, appears to be a human head, on a stainless steel base, like something long forgotten being excavated. Here, the eponymous head is fused to the helmet, flesh and technology merging into one form. This feels echoed in Gormley\u2019s Home and the World II<\/i>, where what begins as a human form changes into something else through the intervention of something more sculpted or technological. But where Hero\u2019s Head<\/i> presents something static, like a relic, Growth Form<\/i> (1957) freezes the process of transformation in time; the long, thin columns of welded steel leading up to a strange, minute figure with a face shaped like a crescent moon and short, slender limbs. The sculpture itself looms over those coming to look at it, and yet the figure at the top isn\u2019t looking down to meet our gaze (if, indeed, it has eyes in the same way that we do). Instead, its abstract visage and outstretched limbs are looking up, beyond us and towards the heavens, as if its next form, or the next step in our evolution, might be out there waiting to be discovered.<\/p>\n

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Richard Hunt, Hero\u2019s Head<\/em>, 1956; Welded steel and stainless steel base, 15.2 x 20.3 x 20.3 cm. | 6 x 8 x 8 in. \u00a9 2025 The Richard Hunt Trust \/ ARS, NY and DACS, London. Photo \u00a9 On White Wall. Courtesy White Cube<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If Gormley\u2019s sculptures present forms that are easily recognisable as human but with the language of a different material\u2014the 1983 piece Untitled (Sleeping Figure)<\/i> lies down looking at the sky, resting the back of its head on a rock the way a softer human might use a pillow in bed, or a bundled up shirt while gazing at the summer sun\u2014then Hunt challenges us to look at his work and find traces of a familiar humanity within it. Opposed Linear Forms<\/i> (1961) looks at first like abstracted fragments of welded steel coming together with the beginning of a gesture of communication. But the longer you look at it, the more these uncertain forms look almost like human figures. The curvature of their peaks takes on the shape of a face in the same way as Growth Form<\/i>, and their entangled, metallic ends look like two people holding hands. But these sculptures, with their fragmented, almost uncertain relationship to the human form must have an ending, a point at which any traces of what we can see and recognise ourselves within finally disappear. This point seems to be reached in \u201cThe Spin Off,\u201d an exhibition of work by Rafa\u0142 Zajko at Focal Point.<\/p>\n

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Rafa\u0142 Zajko, Bread and Milk<\/em>, 2023; at Kunsthalle Wien. Photo courtesy of Kunsthalle Wien<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As the title of Zajko\u2019s exhibition suggests, \u201cThe Spin Off\u201d imagines the idea of what comes next, with the title drawn from the way in which things spin off from films, TV shows and other forms of art. Much of the work here takes its name from films that have been remade\u2014including Solaris<\/i>, Funny Games<\/i> and A Star is Born\u2014<\/i>a sense of the past being written over like a palimpsest, not just of culture, but of humanity. It\u2019s through this language that Zajko explores exactly what human flesh might spin off to in its next iteration. Larder II <\/i>(2025) is comprised of an almost overwhelming number of materials\u2014including bio resin, bronze, stoneware and pickles\u2014and within its case (the front of which feels retrofuturist; cryptic and alien, something that could have been) are small spheres of material which feel similar to Gormley\u2019s Seeds and Ba\u0161i\u0107\u2019s Hypostasis<\/i>: something that might contain the genesis of a new form, something that might have once been human. But beyond that, \u201cThe Spin Off\u201d contains work that has explicitly left any trace of humanity behind. The small, blinking red light at the centre of A Star is Born <\/i>(2025), a vast piece that consumes an entire wall of Focal Point, housed in a transparent circle at the centre of the impenetrable perimeter of concrete, seems to directly reference HAL-9000, the sinister supercomputer from 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/i>, a creation famous for its desire to shed off the humans from the ship, with its monotone delivery of \u201cI\u2019m sorry Dave, I\u2019m afraid I can\u2019t do that.\u201d But in the context of \u201cThe Spin Off,\u201d Zajko\u2019s Star<\/i> is more than just a reference to Kubrick\u2019s sci-fi masterpiece. Here, it\u2019s a point on a map, a sense of what might be waiting for us countless centuries, or even millennia down the line, as we continue to evolve and transform. There\u2019s a tactility to Zajko\u2019s sculptures; they literally aren\u2019t as cold and heavy as work by artists like Gormley and Hunt, and it\u2019s this relative softness, the sense that they might be yielding if touched, that makes them feel strangely human. That they could be as soft and fragile as our flesh, some version of us if different evolutionary choices had been made.<\/p>\n

Solaris <\/i>(2025) is made of melted church candles; like the various spin-offs that lend their names to Zajko\u2019s works in this exhibition, it takes the materiality of the past and transform it into something else. Among all this are fragments of humanity, whether in the uncanny fleshiness of the Larder<\/i> series or the literal materials used in Solaris<\/i>. But humanity as we understand it doesn\u2019t exist here, although it might have done once, a long time ago. Through exhibitions like \u201cThe Spin Off,\u201d \u201cMetamorphosis\u201d and \u201cWitness,\u201d a tension is revealed in these strange, sculptured figures, an uncertainty in their relationship to us. The more time spent looking at them, the more it seems that they might be suggesting that we, with our soft flesh, mortal coils and all too human intelligence, might not be as long for this world as we might hope, daring us to consider what comes next for us, and what might happen if the versions of ourselves that we strain to see when looking at Growth Form<\/i> or Home and the World II<\/i> became obsolete, frozen in time and waiting to be excavated like one of Hunt\u2019s welded steel helmets.<\/p>\n

Anthony Gormley\u2019s \u201c<\/b>Witness: Early Lead Works<\/b><\/a>\u201d at White Cube Mason\u2019s Yard closes on June 8, 2025. Richard Hunt\u2019s \u201cMetamorphosis \u2013 A Retrospective<\/a>\u201d is on view at White Cube Bermondsey through June 29, 2025.<\/b><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Gormley,<\/p><\/div>\n