Antony Gormley, Earth Body

This is the most comprehensive presentation to date of Gormley's polyhedral sculptures. The series, which began in 2008, replaces an anatomically described body with one made of tightly nested and sharp edged polygonal cells. This sculptural language derives from natural structures: the polycrystalline aggregation of basalt or quartz and the bubble matrices in foams and bone. The works BRIDGE and FIX (2017) recall in their condensed forms an earlier series, Insiders (1997-2005), which isolates the body's core and concentrates internal sensation. Other sculptures in the exhibition, like CONTRACT (2016) and COMPACT (2017) use similar bodily postures but provide an organic foil to the orthogonal rectangles of the artist's Blockworks (2003-present). In describing body posture as "the language before language", the artist invites the viewer to empathetically project a range of emotional tonalities onto the work. With this exhibition, as with all his work, the primary challenge is to identify the body as a place in which thoughts, sensations and emotions arise, rather than as an object of idealisation or representation.