The book explores the relationship between the human body and the built environment through sculptures and drawings by Antony Gormley.
Published on the occasion of Antony Gormley's solo exhibition at Galleria Continua in Beijing, Body Buildings interrogates our species' relationship to the built environment, an increasingly high-rise world we rarely escape. In a significant group of recent sculptures and drawings, Gormley uses clay and iron, two ubiquitous materials of the built world, "to think and feel the body in this condition".
This publication illustrates the work in the exhibition through extensive installation photography, guiding readers from Gormley's new installation Resting Place II (2024) to a series of sculptures investigating the relation of body to building and finally to a group of drawings published here for the first time. It also features new scholarship from Hou Hanru and Stephen Greenblatt who trace the development of this new body of work as well as Gormley's 30-year engagement with China and the surrounding region in significant works such as Asian Field (2003), Event Horizon (2007) and Host (2016). A photo essay by the artist also tracks his ongoing dialogue with the region through a series of never-before-seen archival photographs of his first research trip to China in 1995 which took him from the Forbidden City in Beijing to the Terracotta Army in Xi'an.
