With Antony Gormley’s (b. 1950) Geestgrond, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) firmly positions itself within the international exhibition circuit. This is precisely the kind of show that earns a place on the must-see lists of influential art publications and prompts devotees to travel across the world in pursuit of the latest cultural blockbuster. Geestgrond is one such occasion. It is the first large-scale retrospective of the British sculptor who transformed sculpture from an object of detached observation into an interactive encounter. Remarkably, even in his native Britain – a leading force in contemporary art – no survey of comparable scope has yet been staged.

In a tacit rebuttal to the criticism levelled by The Art Newspaper in 2022, when KMSKA reopened after its major restoration and its contemporary galleries were faulted for their pristine white floors, on which scratches quickly became visible, Gormley effectively blesses these spaces. He praises the architects for creating the “white cubes” in which visitors can, as he puts it, “experience sculpture as a sensory event”. White as emptiness itself, the galleries become a void in which his conceptual works appear to float weightlessly. One sculpture from the Domain series addresses Antwerp from the museum’s balustrade, standing alongside nineteenth-century statuary; another is positioned beside Cristina Iglesias’s fountain in front of the museum, while a third occupies a site along the riverbank.

The exhibition title, Geestgrond, suggests a deep rooting in the soil of Flemish art, much as the fertile sandy earth known by that name – formed in the Netherlands during the Ice Age – provides ideal conditions for bulb flowers such as tulips and hyacinths. The compound word combines geest (“spirit” in Dutch) and grond (“ground” or “soil”), invoking the Latin concept of genius loci, the spirit of place. The title rejects any simple division between the spiritual and the material, the human and the planetary. Geestgrond is a deliberately resistant term whose meaning lies not in resolution but in tension.

For Gormley’s practice, and for this exhibition in particular, this double movement between spirit and earth, body and field, weight and circulation, is fundamental. Early works employing lead casings press the human form into dense matter, asserting presence through mass and gravity. Later works, including the Domains and Scribbles series, become porous, schematic and exploratory, as though the body were dissolving into networks, vectors and flows. Yet they never lose contact with the ground. Geestgrond reveals both the roots and the continuing relevance of an artistic practice that poses an urgent question for our time: what does it mean to be human in an age of algorithms and machine learning?

Biography

Antony Gormley was born in London into what he has described as a “very Catholic family”. His father was Irish, while his German mother, originally a Lutheran, converted to Catholicism upon marriage – converts, after all, are often the strictest adherents of their adopted faith. A telling detail is that his parents chose the initials “AMDG”, alluding to the Latin phrase “Ad maiorem Dei gloriam” (“For the greater glory of God”).

The family was comfortably affluent: they employed a cook and a chauffeur, and their house overlooked a golf course. Gormley’s father was an art enthusiast, and works of art were a natural presence in the household. Yet it was his education at Ampleforth College, the Benedictine boarding school in Yorkshire typical of Britain’s professional middle classes, that instilled in him a lasting aversion to organised Catholicism. Nevertheless, religious imagery has never disappeared from his artistic vocabulary. For his dialogue with the KMSKA collection, Gormley selected a wooden crucifix and the fourteenth-century Crucifixion of Hendrik van Rijn – named after its patron rather than its maker – one of the earliest surviving panel paintings produced in the Low Countries. His Catholic background continues to resonate throughout his work, even if often in secularised form.

Equally formative was the three-year journey he undertook through India and Sri Lanka between 1971 and 1974, where he encountered Buddhism and Eastern philosophies. Such travels were not uncommon among educated young Britons of the post-imperial generation seeking intellectual and spiritual horizons beyond Europe. Before embarking on this journey, Gormley had studied archaeology, anthropology and the history of art at Trinity College Cambridge between 1968 and 1971. His decision to become an artist followed his return to Britain, when he enrolled first at Saint Martin’s School of Art and later at Goldsmiths, University of London. In terms of academic pedigree, the education section of Gormley’s CV is difficult to surpass. It combines one of Cambridge’s most prestigious colleges with two institutions that have played a defining role in shaping post-war British art.

At the heart of the exhibition lies the central theme that has defined Antony Gormley’s entire artistic practice: the human body as a means of understanding both ourselves and the world around us. The exhibition explores what it means to be human and to feel alive, how our bodies relate to space, nature and consciousness, and the role of the viewer in creating artistic experience.

One remark by the artist particularly struck me: “There will be as many exhibitions at KMSKA as there are people who come to see Geestgrond.” I immediately imagined tiny figures carrying miniature versions of the exhibition in their hands. And indeed, each visitor will have a unique sensory experience, constructing their own image of the sculptures and museum galleries, and carrying away a personal emotional response. This profoundly human-centred intention is disarming from the very first encounter. There is no trace of condescension towards the viewer. Although Gormley is physically imposing – standing 1.91 metres tall – his artistic generosity is greater still.

The exhibition has been conceived as a closed circuit activated by the movement of visitors. Entering through the nineteenth-century vestibule, visitors encounter Gormley’s Lean (2023), propped against the grand staircase as though supporting its weight. They then pass between Auguste Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid (1881) and Gormley’s Small Stop (Lead) VII (2015), a literal embodiment of mass and gravity. From there they enter the newly created installation Orbital Field III (2026), a vast structure of interlocking rings that envelops the body and draws visitors into the work itself. After moving through the galleries, they emerge through Cave (2019) before returning once more to Orbital Field III, completing the cycle.

At the centre of the exhibition is a section entitled Heart, a room conceived as a modern cabinet of curiosities. Here notebooks, maquettes, photographs, prints, drawings, materials, annotated books and even marginal notes in Gormley’s school copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost reveal the inner workings of his artistic practice – introspective, reflective and concerned with origins. Gormley’s work unfolds through a choreography of encounters. Artworks lean on one another, converse across centuries and bear witness to each other’s existence. In turn, they look back at us.

Gormley has deliberately rejected textual labels for the sculptures, so as not to distract the viewer from the sensory experience. The only texts present are quotations from his favourite classical authors, which create an intellectual atmosphere and function as thematic prompts.

“Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void capable of receiving it, and it is grace itself that creates this void.”

Simone Weil (1940–42), French philosopher, mystic, writer and political thinker

Yet we are wired in such a way that we need explanations for what is not immediately legible. Our guide through the exhibition was its curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Without her, I would not have understood the wall installation made of repeated fragments resembling slices of bread or toast, arranged in a strict grid.

At the centre of this “grid” a human figure is cut out or eroded, creating an effect of negative space: the body is “defined by absence” rather than material presence. Fans of healthy eating might find it amusing. “We are what we eat” – white bread as the most nutritionally empty food, which we nevertheless consume in abundance. We, too, seem to be made of these pale bricks, as if they were our basic building material. The voids, in turn, resemble bites taken out of the bread. The white bread also clearly evokes Catholic communion wafers – the body of Christ in the ritual of the Eucharist – returning the work to questions of embodiment, consumption and spiritual sustenance.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is an American curator, art historian and writer with an international background. She was born in 1957 in the United States into an Italian–Bulgarian family and studied literature, philosophy and art history at the University of Pisa in Italy.

Her career has been closely associated with major institutions of contemporary art. She has worked as a senior curator at MoMA in New York, served as artistic director of the Sydney Biennale, and became one of the most influential figures in the field as artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012), as well as curator of the Istanbul Biennial. Her curatorial approach is distinctly interdisciplinary, bringing together art, philosophy, science and politics, and treating exhibitions as cohesive intellectual and spatial constructs.

In the context of the Gormley exhibition, she has done extensive work on the artist’s early practice and origins. If possible, the “Heart” section is worth returning to for a second visit – it rewards slow, attentive looking and closer study of its archival and conceptual materials.