Born in London in 1950, Antony Gormley spent three years in his early twenties studying Buddhism in India and Sri Lanka, an experience that shaped his belief that the body is our first habitat.
Gormley, who lives and works in London, is perhaps best known for public works such as Angel of the North (1988) and Another Place (2005), where 100 cast-iron figures face the sea. His practice has evolved from the early lead body-cases, using his own body as material, to recent digital experiments that fragment and reconstruct the human form through architectural geometry.
It is somewhat unexpected that an artist of Gormley’s stature, with his deep Asian connections, is only now having his first solo exhibition in Seoul. This September, coinciding with Frieze Seoul, he presents Inextricable at White Cube and Thaddaeus Ropac simultaneously, exploring how urban infrastructure shapes consciousness in cities—where over half of humanity now lives. Just weeks later, his first major US museum survey opens at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
Ground (2025), on show at Museum SAN, was created from the ongoing collaboration between Gormley and Japanese architect Tadao Ando Photo: courtesy of Museum SAN
The Seoul exhibitions follow his ongoing collaboration with Tadao Ando at Museum SAN, where their permanent installation Ground (2025) continues his investigation of how space and time animate the human form.
The Art Newspaper: Your first Seoul solo show has been a long time coming. What previous projects brought you to Korea over the years?
Antony Gormley: I’ve been coming to Korea for quite a long time, for various reasons. I did this project a long time ago with the Kim Dae-jung Foundation that was supposed to be on the central post office in Seoul, and then on top of a bridge in Pyongyang, North Korea. It was a utopian project where these two identical winged figures would look at each other across almost 200km, but they would be on the same axis. That was a long project that was never realised.
More recently, I’ve been working on a project in Sinan, where I’ve been deeply moved by the community’s connection to natural processes—fermentation, salt-making, seaweed farming. It’s wonderful to stay in a home where someone immediately brings you ten different fermentations of things they’ve grown. That sense of engaged rootedness in natural processes has been really enlightening as to the core values and social structure of Korea.
Gormley’s Stay I (2024) is on show at Thaddaeus Ropac’s Seoul gallery Photo: Stephen White; © Antony Gormley
The exhibition is being shown across two traditionally rival galleries. What led you to adopt this collaborative approach?
A very simple answer: I love both those galleries. They’ve been incredibly central to the support of my work, and I didn’t want to choose one over the other, so I decided to do both. Late capitalism is based on competition and false scarcity. They have been traditionally rivals, and I thought this was a very good opportunity to let them not be rivals, but be collaborators—and so far, so good.
The division of works between the two galleries seems deliberate—Blockworks at White Cube, Extended Strapworks at Thaddaeus Ropac…
It’s a response to site and to the affordances of site. The great thing about White Cube is that it’s on the ground, it’s in the street. More works are positioned toward the street-facing windows than in the gallery’s interior. What you do find in the gallery is a tribute to the structure of the city that surrounds it, these massive forms that are out of scale to the architecture of the gallery.
With Ropac, all of the space is above ground. It’s all on the first floor or elevated. And I like to complement the street engagement of the White Cube show with these works that are literally dependent upon the walls, to make the point of our inextricable dependency on an ever more intelligent built environment.
You have moved from direct body casting to digital scanning. Has this shift changed how you think about presence in sculpture?
It was a very pragmatic decision. What this move into digital scanning has allowed is more precarious positions that we could ever have imagined or managed convincingly in plaster.
The challenge with all of this digital technology is not to fall into it but to draw out from the virtual into the physical. I did make a virtual reality piece and I won’t ever make another one, but I was testing its limitations and I think the limitation of virtual reality is that there is no substance at all.
The cyber world invites us to dispense with our bodies or treat them almost as pets to be exercised, fed, housed. Yet the promise of the information age is that we can be fully fulfilled by data. And this is a false promise.
Your Seoul exhibitions open just before your first major US museum survey at the Nasher Sculpture Center. After decades of showing primarily in Europe and Asia, what does this American recognition mean to you?
They are very different shows because the Nasher show is trying… and this was determined by Jed Morse, the chief curator, he wanted to show my journey in art, and particularly with this model gallery, which shows models of unrealised but also realised work. A significant part of my life story has been making permanent works, or so-called permanent works, works in collective space.
These two shows are happening within days of each other, but they are mediated both globally and materially by my contribution to the first Bukhara Biennial in Uzbekistan, which is right in the middle of the Eurasian land mass. I think this is significant. We have this show in an ever more isolated, but continuing to be powerful, America, and an East Asian society that has been profoundly influenced by America and yet is trying to discover its own identity as a global community.
Gormley’s Big Form III (2024) is part of the Inextricable show at White Cube Seoul Photo: Stephen White; © Antony Gormley
You have mentioned being surprised by encountering your own work unexpectedly. After all these years, how has your relationship with your sculptures changed?
I used to think that I made my work, but now I think my work makes me. In other words, I am now in the position where I am answering its demands, not making demands on it. It has within it an inevitability. Everything I make now is, in a sense, the foundation of the next work or has within it the questions that need to be re-asked. Everything I make now is a surprise to me because I can no longer necessarily tell you, in terms of my life story, where something comes from; I can only explain it in the terms of the ontology of the work itself.
• Inextricable, Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul and White Cube Seoul, 2 September-18 October
• Drawing on Space, Museum SAN, Wonju, until 30 November
• Survey: Antony Gormley, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, 13 September-4 January 2026