Antony Gormley Critical Mass Exhibition at the Rodin Museum in Paris, from October 17, 2023, to March 3, 2024

What to expect

The "Antony Gormley Critical Mass" exhibition at the Rodin Museum in Paris, from October 17, 2023, to March 3, 2024, offers a captivating exploration of contemporary sculpture through the works of British artist Antony Gormley. Titled "Critical Mass," this exhibition unfolds across various spaces within the museum, including the gardens, the Marble Gallery, and the Hôtel Biron, in addition to the temporary exhibition halls.

Gormley, renowned for rediscovering and reinventing the human figure, showcases his talent for bringing spaces to life with monumental and fascinating works. Inspired by Auguste Rodin, he has experimented and innovated in expressing the body, resulting in unconventional creations. The exhibition features sixty life-sized sculptures arranged along a surprising route, extending from the museum to the garden. These sculptures explore the relationship between the human body and its environment, as well as the surrounding space, with Gormley questioning emotions and feelings arising from natural positions such as sitting, crouching, crawling, or standing.

At the heart of the exhibition is "Critical Mass II" (1995), an installation comprising sixty life-sized sculptures punctuating the temporary exhibition space and the museum garden. Gormley isolates twelve unique fundamental positions of the human body, each molded five times, and arranges them in different configurations, sometimes contradictory and absurd. The bodies, depicted in positions like crawling, crouching, kneeling, and standing, unfold in the garden, with a line of the twelve positions culminating at Rodin's "Gates of Hell." Inside, a dense cluster of cast iron bodies appears to have spilled onto the floor, while others are pressed against the walls or suspended from the ceiling.

In addition to "Critical Mass II," six of Gormley's "Insider" works populate the Marble Gallery, and four carefully selected sculptures are placed alongside Rodin's masterpieces in the permanent exhibition halls of the Hôtel Biron. The interaction between Gormley's works and Rodin's challenges and disrupts our existing assumptions about sculpture and its relationship with the body. The exhibition also provides a fascinating glimpse into Gormley's working methods and his collaborative approach to sculpture creation, a common thread that extends back to Rodin's studio and his collective production mode.

Gormley, by exploring the boundaries of art and realism, illustrates how inert matter tells the story of the living. The exhibition also presents various creations that play with material, space, and air, as well as behind-the-scenes aspects of his work, such as molds, sketchbooks, and studies. These pieces allow for a deeper appreciation of the works and reveal their genesis. Over two hundred of Gormley's sketchbooks are also on display, unveiling forty years of ideas, reflections, and drawings.

For Gormley, Rodin remains a key source of inspiration and renewal for sculpture due to how he liberated it by combining ancient and modern methods and materials in an extraordinarily foresighted manner. Through open experimentation, the pioneer of modern sculpture fully embraced the freedom to experiment, armed with the means of an emerging industrial era and its ability to mechanically produce in abundance. Gormley considers "Critical Mass II" as the most concentrated example of his attempt to revive and reuse the power of the body in the art of sculpture.

The "Antony Gormley Critical Mass" exhibition is open every day except Monday, from 10:00 AM to 6:30 PM. The full admission fee for the Rodin Museum Paris is 13 euros.

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