{"id":9195,"date":"2018-05-25T09:37:59","date_gmt":"2018-05-25T08:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=9195"},"modified":"2020-09-04T15:33:43","modified_gmt":"2020-09-04T14:33:43","slug":"ra250-at-the-fitz-antony-gormley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/2018\/05\/25\/ra250-at-the-fitz-antony-gormley\/","title":{"rendered":"RA250 at the Fitz: Antony Gormley"},"content":{"rendered":"

Antony Gormley<\/a> is one of 7 Royal Academicians, who have connections with Cambridge, taking part in RA250 at the Fitz<\/a>.<\/h2>\n

We asked each to pick a work in our collection that has inspired them and tell us why.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Portrait of Antony Gormley Photo: Stephen White, London<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Antony chose Man with a broken nose, <\/em>by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), on display in Gallery 5:<\/p>\n

\"\"
Man with a broken nose, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) c. The Fitzwilliam Museum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Here, Gormley explains why he chose this work:<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember it from my very first visit to the museum. It stands out as an awkward thing amongst the Bukhara rugs, hyacinths and the smell of furniture polish that grace the Fitzwilliam. It\u2019s almost like this thing has been being dug up from the ground, something from any time in human history. Once you see this work, life-size and lifelike, it\u2019s difficult to forget it. It seems classical but also very modern. It could be the head of an ancient (like the Arundel Head<\/a> in the British Museum) but it\u2019s also the portrait of modern man.<\/p>\n

Rodin is perhaps the master of metonymy: this mask allows the face, visage, appearance to stand for a whole life. Time and experience sculpted this face before Rodin modelled it. There is something of Dickens and of Zola here. Idealisation and the heroic trope have given way to an interest in the street and a more generous idea of the value of human experience. Here is a man seen as a mask. Part of the poignancy of this work is not just that the back of the head fell off in the frost of the young Rodin\u2019s studio but that this loss reveals the sculpture as a front, a cover, but a cover that reveals the truth about human experience. Rodin allows us to peer into the space behind the face, acknowledging that a hollow bronze is another form of illusion. Form becomes an empty vessel, inviting the projection of our empathy.<\/p>\n

\"\"
FREE OBJECT, 2017
North Meadow at Trinity College
Photo: Rachel Sinfield<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What is the feeling we receive or project? This man\u2019s features: blank eyes, furrowed brows, broken nose, closed mouth offer us a potent expression of uncertainty. In spite of a life that has written its hard story across his features, this noble man is still lost, lost for words, for a place, lost for understanding.<\/p>\n

This mask that seems to face the human predicament may well be the opening to an existential purpose for sculpture. A sculptural tradition that was designed to promote the ideal, the mythic, the heroic and the sexual now becomes engaged with questioning the nature of reality. The door is left open for Giacometti, Beckett and Artaud to deal with the human condition without the props of narrative, mythology, idealisation, or the norms of portraiture with their attendant flattery.<\/p>\n

Rodin cannot be copied but the bodily, psychological and philosophical implications of his work are a continuing point of inspiration that asks how the body can be reanimated in the art of our time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
LEARNING TO SEE VI, 1995
Cast iron
196 x 48 x 35 cm
Installation image, Jesus College, Cambridge, U.K.
\u00a9 the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

SUBJECT\u00a0<\/em>at Kettle’s Yard<\/h3>\n

Why not combine a visit to see this Rodin sculpture at the Fitz with a visit to Kettle\u2019s Yard to see the exhibition SUBJECT<\/em><\/a>, which contains five of Gormley\u2019s works, open until 27 August 2018.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Antony Gormley with Dr Jenny Powell, Head of Collection and Programme, and Andrew Nairne, Director, alongside
Subject,<\/em> 2018 at Kettle\u2019s Yard
10 mm mild steel bar
185 x 52.3 x 40 cm
Photo:\u00a0 Rachel Sinfield<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For SUBJECT,<\/em> the artist has activated and disrupted the gallery\u2019s new spaces.\u00a0 Insisting that the body is the mind\u2019s first dwelling, Gormley has always wanted his work to interact with architecture and the earth.<\/p>\n

The five sculptures in the exhibition interrogate the body in space and the body as space.\u00a0 The works use solid mass and open net structures to invite and imply our presence.\u00a0 All of these sculptures use front\/back, left\/right and up\/down physical co-ordinates positioned at 90 degrees to one another to articulate both architectural space and the space of the body.<\/p>\n

The \u2018subject\u2019 of this exhibition is as much our own bodies, their relationship to the sculptures in the gallery and to the architecture of the spaces, as the works themselves.\u00a0 SUBJECT<\/em> might also carry us beyond these physical encounters, to consider an internalised, limitless space of the mind.<\/p>\n

\"\"
DAZE IV, 2014
Cast iron
179 x 34.5 x 44 cm
Installation image, Sidgwick Site, Cambridge, U.K.
Photograph by Lloyd Mann
\u00a9 the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"
PLANT, 2002
Cast iron
195 x 57 x 42 cm
Edition 3 of 3
Installation image, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge, U.K.
Photograph by Marcus J Leith
\u00a9 the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Antony Gormley is one of 7 Royal Academicians, who have connections with Cambridge, taking part in RA250 at the Fitz. We asked each to pick a work in our collection that has inspired them and tell us why. Antony chose Man with a broken nose, by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), on display in Gallery 5: Here, Gormley explains why he chose… Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":9206,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[168,369,156],"tags":[219,218],"coauthors":[276],"class_list":["post-9195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kettles-yard","category-museum-life","category-the-fitzwilliam-museum","tag-collections-engagement","tag-cultural-value"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9195"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9210,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9195\/revisions\/9210"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9195"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}