ANTONYGORMLEY(b. 1950)Domain III.Welded steel.75 x 20 ½ in. (190.5 x 52.1 cm).Executed in 1999.Provenance
Jablonka Galerie, CologneExhibited
Cologne, Jablonka Galerie, Antony Gormley, November 5-December 4, 1999Throughout his body of work, Antony Gormley has almost obsessively focused on the body as a place, exploring the universe that exists inside the body, as well as the relationship of the body to the immediate space it inhabits both in the built environment and the elemental world. With the creation of his Domain sculptures, Antony Gormley was fascinated by the realization that bodies need not be made. Instead, he began conjuring them from a series of voids, in works so reliant on contour that they seem akin to drawing in space. In the present lot, Domain III, the zone of Gormley's body becomes an open matrix, where the viewer is keenly and simultaneously aware of the human presence, but also its absence. Gormley constructed Domain III from stainless steel bars of various lengths, whereas in previous works his sculptures portrayed his whole body, holding open spaces within it. Gormley himself states that "the body is language before language. When made still in sculpture it can be witness to life" (A. Gormley, Antony Gormley, Total Strangers, Cologne 1997, pp. 21-22).

In speaking of his Domain works, Gormley himself explains, "How do you make memory? What is the relationship between memory and anticipation? Can you make something that is physical which at the same time evokes the process of remembering? Is it possible to do this and make something fresh, like dew or frost - something that just is, as if its form had always been like this. The structures that make up these works are random matrices that identify the body less as an object and more as a place of becoming. I am drawn to fractal geometry and other ways in which science has allowed us to see and participate in the invisible. I feel somewhat uncomfortable describing my work because I want it to be free to be experienced freely. At the same time it is important that it comes from somewhere very concrete: the living moment of a living body experiencing its own existence" (A. Gormley, Antony Gormley Domain Field, January 2004)