domenica 29 aprile 2012

ANTONY GORMLEY: HORIZON FIELD HAMBURG - DEICHTORHALLEN, HAMBURG



ANTONY GORMLEY
HORIZON FIELD HAMBURG
Deichtorhallen
Deichtorstrasse 1-2 - Hamburg
26/4/2012 - 9/9/2012

British artist Antony Gormley has developed a new, spectacular installation especially for the large Deichtorhalle: HORIZON FIELD HAMBURG will go on show during the documenta.
Visitors will enter the north hall of the Deichtorhallen to be confronted by a space that is almost 4,000 sq. m. in size, nearly 19 meters high and virtually empty. Here, a vast, black, reflective structure will float 7.5 meters above the floor, inviting adventure. The suspended, slightly oscillating platform exploits the structural potential and architectural context of the Deichtorhallen building, taking visitors into a new spatiotemporal matrix.
HORIZON FIELD HAMBURG will provoke an experience of re-orientation and re-connection with walking, feeling, hearing and seeing. Like a horizontal painting stretched taut in space, the visitor will be positioned as a figure in a free, floating, undefined ground.

For almost 40 years now, Antony Gormley has been creating sculptures in which he explores the relationship between the human body and space. This is explicitly addressed in his large-format works such as »Another Place«, »Domain Field« and »Inside Australia«, and implicitly in works such as »Clearing«, »Breathing Room« and »Blind Light« where the work becomes a frame through which the viewer becomes the viewed. By using his own existence as a test ground, Gormley’s work transforms a site of subjective experience into one of collective projection. Increasingly, the artist has taken his practice beyond the gallery, engaging the public in active participation, as in »Clay and the Collective Body« (Helsinki) and the celebrated »One & Other« in London’s Trafalgar Square.
Gormley’s artistic oeuvre has been showed extensively in a number of solo exhibitions in Great Britain: the Whitechapel Gallery, the Serpentine Gallery, the Tate and Hayward Galleries as well as the British Museum and White Cube. Moreover, his works have been presented in solo shows in international museums including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), Malmö Konsthall (Sweden), Kunsthalle zu Kiel (Germany), the National Museum of Modern Chinese History (Beijing), Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (Mexico City, Kunsthaus Bregenz (Austria) and the State Hermitage Museum (St Petersburg). Gormley has also participated in group shows in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, at the Venice Biennale and in documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany. Major public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England) and Exposure (Lelystad, Netherlands).
Gormley has received many awards, such as the Turner Prize (1994), the South Bank Award for the Visual Arts (1999) and the Bernhard Heiliger Preis für Skulptur (2007). In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE). He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an honorary doctor of the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and since 2007 a British Museum trustee.
Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950.

This project is being organized by Deichtorhallen Hamburg in cooperation with Galerie Thaddeus Ropac and was made possible by the generous patronage of NORDMETALL-Stiftung and Kulturstiftung des Bundes. The structural concept is being provided by schlaich bergermann und partner.