Antony Gormley: Critical Mass

Titled Critical Mass, this exhibition at the Musée Rodin activates all areas of the museum, including the temporary exhibition space, gardens, Marble Galerie and Hotel Biron. Key works from across Gormley’s career enter into dialogue with Rodin’s own sculptures, inviting visitors to reflect on the two sculptors and their shared investment in asking what the body offers sculpture as a subject, object and reflexive tool.

At the centre of this exhibition is Critical Mass II (1995), an installation comprising sixty life-sized sculptures that punctuate the museum’s temporary exhibition space and garden. In this major work, the artist isolates twelve fundamental positions unique to the human body, casts each five times and then places them in different configurations, sometimes to contradictory and absurd effect. Crawling, squatting, kneeling and standing, the installation will unfold in the garden with a line of the twelve positions that ends at Rodin’s The Gates of Hell. Inside, a dense cluster of cast iron bodies piled in a heap will look as if they have been toppled onto the ground. Other bodies will be pressed against walls and hang suspended from the ceiling. For Gormley, ‘the work references the materiality of sculpture and our dependency on the materiality of the body, both being subject to position, context and jeopardy’.