I could not believe my luck when I realized the Lincoln, MA sculpture park had a Gormley sculpture in its permanent collection. He is my absolute favorite of the contemporary sculptural artists (although closely followed by Emily Young.)

You can find a good sampling at their respective websites: http://www.antonygormley.com  –  http://www.emilyyoung.com.

Gormley has a knack for site specific installations and quite often they involve reflection. They can be small, like the one in Lincoln, or huge, like the one in Hamburg, Germany, that I visited in 2012 ( faithful readers have gotten their share of those photographs before…. but it’s worth the repetition.)

The former is the form of a man who seemingly looks into a pane of glass and sees his reflection. In reality and very quickly visible, these are two identical sculptures, mirror image reversed, that are facing each other, divided by said glass. The acquisition of this piece was guided by a commitment to showing sculpture both inside the de Cordova and outside in their magnificent park. Or so says the website….

The latter – Horizon Fields –  was located in a former market hall in Hamburg, that has become a place for changing art exhibits. The hall was filled with a platform suspended from the roof across the entire length and width of the building. The top of the platform was a mirror, walking on it (in your socks, once you had overcome the embarrassment of potential holes in them) was not for the faint of heart. The reflections were disorienting, and the suspension of the platform made the hole thing swing lightly. But, oh, the views! The sense of a manipulation in space with you at some difficult-to-assess spatial point right in it was truly exhilarating.

http://deichtorhallen.de/index.php?id=257&L=1

Last year Gormley showed his political colors in a show that featured 600 cast-iron human skyscrapers, expressing his anger about London’s testosterone-fuelled corporate expansion.  “We are living in a really strange time,” Gormley said. “Yet we are all sleepwalking through it. And it is urgent we wake up. We are sort of aware the centre cannot hold, that 250 years of industrial activity has undermined and fundamentally disturbed our world – yet we feel somehow not responsible.” He called Sleeping Fields “manic, but incredible good fun.“

Seems like the fun ended, though, when 3 months ago another one of his projects was altered by some unknown artist, or vandal, depending on your point of view. His series of figures at Crosby Beach in England acquired some polka dot bikinis and the like.

Attached is a video of the installation. It give you a taste of the full scope of the installation.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jun/22/antony-gormley-crosby-beach-sculptures-vandalised-bikini

This reminds me of my friend Steve Tilden whose large metal horse sculpture in North Portland was “decorated” with a lot of knitted and crocheted garments, time and again.  Maybe someone thought the horse was cold…..