Antony Gormley - Testing a World View

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Antony Gormley - “Testing a World View”

The physical features of “Testing a World View” are that it’s a sculptural installation made of five identical iron figures bent at right angles. The sculptures are made from a cast made from the artist’s body. Gormley would have started by covering himself in mudrock, creating with these bases moulds within sand and finally casting them into iron. As we know the body isn’t symmetrical so it would’ve had to been cut while in the mudrock stage and realigned to create stability. The main posture of the figurines is that they’re bending forward at a 90 degrees angle, linking with the absolute laws of geometry. Gormley further explored by positioning the sculptures in different ‘absolute’ orientation. According to the artist, the positioning evokes states ranging from “hysteria, head-banging, catatonia, to the awakened dead and the about-to-be-beheaded “

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What you can see firstly is that the main subject is the human body. And Gormley looks deeply into this subject, within the making of the sculptures. The moulds started off with themselves are an “emptiness with a certain function”, potentially to create something positive out of this emptiness. I think the positive thing which is created from the emptiness is within the dark sculptures as they seem to be “trying” to evoke a feeling of freedom within them. You can clearly see that the sculptures themselves contain no features, and I think Gormley would have done it is ...

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