Antony Gormley: Geestgrond

Including drawings and sketchbooks, models and maquettes, this retrospective is the largest solo exhibition of Gormley’s work to be staged in Europe

Antony Gormley: Geestgrond, KMSKA Museum, Antwerp, 23 May – 20 September 2026. Photo: © Sanne De Block.

KMSKA Museum, Antwerp
23 May – 20 September 2026

by VERONICA SIMPSON

Antony Gormley (b1950, London) is an artist of whom few in the western world will not have heard. In large part, this is thanks to his public sculptures, from his Angel of the North (Gateshead, 1994-98) to his metal figures, cast from his own body. These have stood sentry everywhere from Crosby Beach near Liverpool (Another Place, 2005) to the Southbank Centre in London (Event Horizon, 2007) to Rio de Janeiro (2012), where their rooftop positioning caused them to be dubbed “suicide statues”. There is such a global proliferation of images of these sculptures that you could be forgiven for thinking Gormley has done little else. But that’s not true – as anyone who saw his excellent Royal Academy of Arts (RA) show of 2019 would know.

Model of Antony Gormley's Angel of the North. Installation view , KMSKA Museum, Antwerp, 23 May – 20 September 2026. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

This retrospective at KMSKA (the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp) is the largest solo exhibition of Gormley’s work to be staged in Europe. It is, in many ways, similar to the RA show – in the breadth of work, including drawings and sketchbooks, models and maquettes, and also some of the works selected. Cave (2019) is here, exhibited for the first time since the RA: a sequence of patinated steel rooms and corridors that you move around almost blind, feeling your way, intensely aware of the contours and materiality of this metal enclosure and your body inside it. Also here is an extended, expanded “slinky” of an artwork at the entrance (the slinky being a 20th-century toy, a metal spring that was floppy enough to “walk” down a staircase, providing hours of amusement in the pre-internet age). The RA slinky was Clearing VII (2019), a room crammed with 8km (5 miles) of coiled aluminium tube, twisting and clustered so as to be almost impenetrable. This Antwerp iteration is silvery, shiny and less of a tangle. Orbit Field III (2026) waltzes across the lobby before the main gallery in graceful curves; the care required to navigate your way through it makes you acutely aware of the dimensions of your human form and the scale of the room.  

Antony Gormley: Geestgrond, KMSKA Museum, Antwerp, 23 May – 20 September 2026. Photo: © Sanne De Block.

The ambition to make us intensely aware of our bodies in this space, in this moment is very much at the heart of the show. At a public Q&A at the museum and in person, guiding a group of us around the show, Gormley states the case for art as an antidote to the crisis we find ourselves in, with digital distractions increasingly alienating us from our own bodily experiences, as well as our social and earthly environments. At the Q&A he said: “Art is the way that life expresses itself, feels itself, reflects on itself. It belongs in, with and to the world. I feel it’s time to reattach that fundamental belief. It’s through art we understand our animal nature and our relationship to other beings.” The more “art has become incredibly commodified and institutionalised”, he suggests, the more we need art “to reassert the importance of first-hand physical experience”.

In this mission, he is united with the show’s curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, an art world legend in her own right, as the artistic director of Documenta 13 and former director of Turin’s Castello di Rivoli museum. Gormley’s work, she says, “is of the utmost importance and has been for a long time … They are making robots to clean dishes and to kill people. And Antony Gormley has always been the artist who believes in the importance of the materially embodied person.”

Together they hatched the unusual title for this show, Geestgrond. A word that has no direct English translation, it offers multiple interpretations. As a geological term, it refers to the sandy soil of the Low Countries formed during the ice age; while geest can mean soul, spirit or breath, and grond means ground or earth. That connection between earth and spirit, past and present, could be seen as the essence of this show.

The pairing of Gormley with a curator is unusual – Gormley typically organises and curates his own shows. The pair had never properly met, until the KMSKA’s director, Carmen Willems, invited them to collaborate, in anticipation of the stimulating conversations it might spark, not least between Gormley’s work and the building – which reopened in 2022 after a refurbishment involving a glowing, white, modern sequence of rooms at the centre of this ornate, neoclassical monument.

Willems also gave Christov-Bakargiev carte blanche to place Gormley’s work in conversation with the museum’s wider collection. And these conversations make for a more interesting and engaging show, but so do Christov-Bakargiev’s choices of Gormley’s work. She was given free rein in his archives, visiting his studio in north London multiple times – an experience that Gormley says was like psychoanalysis – to pick out the works she felt should form that conversation. In so doing, she found many resonances between their artistic positions and philosophies. “He was born 1950, I was born in 1957, she says. “He grew up admiring arte povera and land art and so did I. That shapes our world view. And the importance of materials and the flow of energy. We quickly found these moments of connection.”

There are works from his earliest years as an art student, in the late 70s and early 80s; there are works showing directions he explored but never followed up; there are intimate drawings he made and never intended to be shown. It does feel like a deeper than usual, more personal dive into the spirit of the man as well as the artist, his decades of practice and his processes.

Antony Gormley, Open Door, 1975. Installation view, KMSKA Museum, Antwerp, 23 May – 20 September 2026. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

The works in the first gallery, beyond Orbit Field III, mainly take us into his early preoccupations – when he was exploring what he calls “humanity’s capacity for creation as well as destruction”. One of the first we encounter is a wall-mounted door with vertical slices carved out of it, revealing the crucifix of wood that supports the frame (Open Door, 1975). We find one of his first exhibited pieces, Natural Selection (shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1981), a 10-metre (33ft) stretch of objects starting with seeds, tools, fruit and vegetables encased in lead, and ending with weapons. We also find a pile of lead bullets (Seeds VI, 2008), near the figure of a man, hunched in embryo position, inside a chunk of Portland stone (Man Rock 1, 1982). There is a circular arrangement on the floor of slim cross-sections of a larch tree (Flat Tree, 1978). He describes this as “time laid out as a space”. (Later, he says he had never heard of Giuseppe Penone’s similar works in wood at the time but, acknowledging Penone’s prior claim, his tree explorations were subsequently parked). An adjacent chalk drawing (Exercise between Blood and Earth, 1979-81) resembles a diagram of tree rings but – if you look carefully – also reveals the small figure of a running man. I am drawn to Blanket Drawing 1 (1983), a headless figure painted in motion, in clay, at the top of a woollen blanket. It is placed high on the wall, making me intensely aware of the elevated body and its missing head; it induces a feeling of being lightheaded, literally. Gormley, says: “Right from the beginning, I thought of the body as a place rather than a concept.”

Antony Gormley with Attend, 2025. Installation view , KMSKA Museum, Antwerp, 23 May – 20 September 2026. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

To connect those original impulses with today, at the front of this gallery is a much newer work, comprising rusted tendrils of metal arranged in the form of a man, Attend (2025). Gormley explains: “It’s an object that talks about its own ontology. It’s a matrix, a bit like a highly pruned vine where the core tendril goes from 40mm to 4mm … It’s telling you how it’s made.” This process, he says, starts with an initial structure made of polystyrene, which is then covered in refractive coating and buried in sand and encased. Molten metal at a temperature of 170C is poured in, vaporising the polystyrene and replacing it with iron. “It takes under a minute to go from being an incredibly fragile, light material to a metal one,” he says. I’m wary of artworks that sound more interesting in the telling of their making than in the experience. Does this version of the standing man say anything different from the more solid ones? I’m not sure, though it does seem less overtly gendered, more of a universal statement of humankind, rather than a copy of Gormley’s own form. It is as much a thing of air as of metal. Gormley says: “On the one hand it is like a statue, and on the other hand it is not like a statue. There’s no portraiture. It’s a registration of a lived moment in time, translated into a kind of tense and paradoxical contraction between a heavy orthogonal system and an organic one. It conveys what it’s like to live inside a body.”

Antony Gormley: Geestgrond, KMSKA Museum, Antwerp, 23 May – 20 September 2026. Photo: © Sanne De Block.

In the room beyond, we have three more standing men, but of the earliest, mid-80s iteration – one with an elongated neck (Tree, 1984), another with arms extended (Field, 1984-85), and one protruding horizontally from the wall, next to a romantic, early seascape, Grijze zee/Grey Seascape (1880), painted by James Ensor. A caption states: “The atmosphere is perceived through the dissolution of boundaries between the registers: beach, sea and sky merge into one another.” Gormley found this painting lovely, the caption informs us, and its placing here makes perfect sense, as his work in this room is also exploring the human form, testing its gravitational and anatomical boundaries. In the opposite corner sits a pale, concrete iteration of Gormley’s crouching figures, represented in clusters of squares and oblongs (Corner II, 2022).

Antony Gormley, Corner II, 2022. Installation view , KMSKA Museum, Antwerp, 23 May – 20 September 2026. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

We move then into a corridor connecting us to the museum’s rear lobby – an expansive space with wide stairs extending at each side from a grand, rear door. En route, we meet one of Gormley’s more recent figures, Butt (2022), made of 20mm square section steel cubes, leaning its forehead rather mournfully against the wall. Another of these is visible at the foot of the stairs, head resting on its forearm, exuding weariness or despair.

Within this lobby the star objects are three wooden sculptures selected by Christov-Bakargiev from the archive, including Sedes Sapientiae (c1180-1220), the oldest work in the museum’s collection. It’s a “very early version of sculpture”, says Gormley, though by now, its decaying features resemble rusted steel more than wood. Another, carved from a single block of wood, is a late medieval figure of Saint Antony Abbot. Bearded and wearing monastic robes, his age-blasted exterior and glimpses of a hollow interior throw up echoes with Gormley’s figures. Another is a representation of an Old Testament story of suffering, The Misery of Job by Ossip Zadkine, who studied wood carving in his native Belarus before moving to London and then Paris in the early 1900s. Its four connected figures are voluptuously curved and at the same time somehow cuboid – “boxed in”, as the caption suggests, like Gormley’s “block-shaped body cases”. Gormley calls this: “An absolutely beautiful idea, to bring these into this space. They describe so clearly an aspiration towards wisdom. The idea of a transcendent life.” 

Christov-Bakargiev admits there would have been a lot more explanatory or exploratory captions, but Gormley put his foot down. She says: “I was ready to write text for all the works. Antony was horrified at the idea that people would be reading the text rather than experiencing the work.” However, she has managed to shoehorn in quite a lot of them, along with profound quotes strewn across the walls, taken from books loved by Gormley and Christov-Bakargiev. Many of these are present, as we later find, on a shelf of Gormley’s favourite reading matter that the curator has assembled, along with other fascinating items from Gormley’s studio and archives, at the heart of the exhibition.

Detail from Gormley's archive. Installation view , KMSKA Museum, Antwerp, 23 May – 20 September 2026. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

This “heart” is contained within a cross section of four pale, smaller rooms in the modern galleries at the museum’s core – usually filled with Ensor’s works (the KMSKA is the proud repository of a world-class Ensor collection). Here we see, displayed for close inspection in vitrines and cases, sketches, books, drawings, photographs, models and maquettes from decades of work. There are documentary photographs of Gormley’s explorations and trips around the world, to India and to Australia, alongside atmospheric early drawings that he seems almost embarrassed to have on display. “They’re romantic,” he says, as if in apology. “One is of a hut that’s attached by cables to a rock and exposed to the west coast of Scotland. A wonderful place to go and just be with the elements. Carolyn saw it and said, we’ve got to have that. It’s very strange to me that they are here.”

Antony Gormley, Murmur, 2014. Installation view, KMSKA Museum, Antwerp, 23 May – 20 September 2026. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

Christov-Bakargiev calls this archive display “a dataset of Antony Gormley’s being”. It’s certainly a moment for calm and quiet reflection. There’s also a vitrine dedicated to his Angel of the North, which Christov-Bakargiev calls: “One of my favourite works in the outdoors.”

Before you get to this central Wunderkammer, his sculpture Murmur (2014) occupies a glowing room whose dimensions seems to have been designed specifically for this work. An exploded cube described in multiple thin strands of black metal, its elongated geometries vibrate against the luminous, white walls, floors and ceilings. It stands in counterpart to a much smaller, opaque version (Form IV, 2014). The effect of these in dialogue, in their own, seemingly bespoke space, is mesmerising.

Antony Gormley, Cave, 2019. Installation view, Geestgrond, KMSKA Museum, Antwerp, 23 May – 20 September 2026. Photo: © Sanne De Block.

But the real spectacle is reserved for the last room: Cave. Again, it is amazing the way this sprawling work fits the dimensions of this new, triple-height gallery; at the RA, it seemed crammed in, its entrance poking out from beyond a door frame. Gormley calls this natural fit “near miraculous” and is delighted that the presence of a staircase at the side allows the visitor to walk up and view this sequence of un/folding metal boxes from above. Having crouched, crawled and hunched your way through Cave, you are waved off towards the exit with a wonderful wall quote, from the French philosopher Simone Weil: “Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”

From here, we swoop back into the silvery whorls of Orbit Field III, and through a grand, ornamental doorway, framed by two remarkable bronzes: a glorious Rodin (The Fallen Caryatid, 1881), presenting the lithe upper limbs, torso and head of a female “collapsed beneath the stone she was meant to support”, as Christov-Bakargiev’s curatorial caption states, and a Gormley, Small Stop (Lead) VII (2016), where “the body itself becomes mass”.

The Calvary of Hendrik van Rijn, 1363. Installation view, KMSKA Museum, Antwerp, 23 May – 20 September 2026. Photo: Veronica Simpson.

There are other interesting encounters between works Christov-Bakargiev has chosen to accompany Gormley’s. Close by the standing Attend and Gormley’s Open Door, in the first gallery is a painting, artist unknown, one of the earliest panel paintings in the KMSKA collection, The Calvary of Hendrik van Rijn (1363). According to the curatorial wall text, it “presents the crucifixion within a square, geometrically ordered field. Christ’s body is stretched along the cross’s vertical and horizontal axes. The points where the nails pierce the hands mark the moment where geometry wounds the body.” The text draws analogies between this and Gormley’s translation of bodies into geometric systems. But its placement there also acts as a reminder that Gormley, who was born into a wealthy Catholic family, was educated in a quasi-monastic environment at the famous Catholic boarding school Ampleforth College. At home and school, his formative years will have been infused with religious imagery, with nails and crosses, not to mention endless repetitions of the still and surrendered male form (naked apart from an artfully draped loin cloth). It is also worth remembering that he completed a degree in archaeology, anthropology and the history of art at Cambridge before studying art (from 1974) at St Martins School of Art and then Goldsmiths, moving to sculpture at the Slade School of Art in the early 80s. And that connection between ancient and modern – in the man as well as the work and this place – feels especially vibrant in this show.

It is also rare to see works that dialogue so closely with the architecture, with Gormley’s work taking full advantage of these dramatic new interior spaces. Referring to these contemporary galleries’ luminosity, as well as their being situated in the core of the older building, Gormley says he feels privileged to have been able to occupy “this ‘ectopic’ space, to reboot what art can be and the restaging of first-hand experience”. Its particular aesthetic, he says, feels like “a test site. I rarely work in conditions that are so like a laboratory. The white floors and walls and particular light conditions allow you to feel that sense of testing and experimenting.”

There are three further Gormley sculptures, of the standing-man variety, beyond the museum interior: one perched on the roof, overlooking a more classical sculpture of winged charioteers; another standing in contemplation of Cristina Iglesias’s tidal fountain on the museum plaza, and another placed way down the end of a street that leads from the museum to the harbour’s edge. These versions are more air than metal; like the lightest, silvery, sketch marks, summoned to create a human form. Says Gormley: “The three sculptures around the building are very important to me … they work to make the building more porous.”

At the opening, he speaks eloquently on the role of museums in this age of fragmenting realities: “Museums are historic registers of human life … gathered in a city but somehow apart from it, which invite contemplation. We need these spaces more than ever before.” With this show, and the debates programmed to run alongside it, the KMSKA is playing a valuable part in today’s crucial dialogues.