Antony Gormley: Frimament

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In the lower-ground gallery, Gormley has installed a single 'expanded field' constructed from 1770 steel elements and 1019 steel balls, welded together to create a non-regular, polygonal structure whose form dissolves and resolves throughout the gallery. Pressed against the edges of the gallery space, the installation, entitled Firmament, brings to mind an assembled matrix of volumes that map a celestial constellation while also implying the form of a body that is lost within it. With its graphic outline, Firmament looms over the viewer, and at times feels claustrophobic, while at others it comes across as a landscape-like drawing in space. Gormley's work has always been about our sense of perception, testing what it feels like to experience our physical presence in certain conditions of time and space. In this installation, the viewer is asked to readjust, continually, their relationship to the field as they navigate through it. The work was developed with Tristan Simmonds of the Advanced Geometry Unit at Arup, and it builds upon the collaboration that began with Space Station, which was shown at The Hayward Gallery.

On the ground-floor gallery, Gormley has activated the space with 32 solid-iron body forms that chronicle six moments of physical endurance. The works have been placed throughout the space on floors, walls and ceiling. Lost Horizon is an internalised form of Event Horizon, his celebrated installation over the rooftops of central London, but here the installation forms a concentrated, haptic field that acts directly on the body of the viewer. Like Critical Mass, which Gormley has reconfigured and assembled in many different architectural environments, Lost Horizon is a temporary infection of a given site, with the potential to activate other spaces in the future.