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Antony Gormley
Quantum Cloud VIII, 1999

Artwork Info

Artwork title
Quantum Cloud VIII
Artist name
Antony Gormley
Date created
1999
Classification
sculpture
Medium
steel
Dimensions
88 1/4 in. × 49 in. × 38 in. (224.16 cm × 124.46 cm × 96.52 cm)
Credit
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Copyright
© Antony Gormley
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/FC.688
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

Audio Stories

Gormley on representing the body as substance and energy

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transcripts

SFX: The air is punctuated with ethereal sounds that come at the listener from all sides 

 

ANTONY GORMLEY:  

Lets think about the body as a place rather than as an object 

 

NARRATOR: 

Antony Gormley makes sculpture of what it feels like on the inside of the body. 

 

GORMLEY:  

… thats a pretty impossible project for sculpture but it is the basis of what Im interested in. Im dealing with the distinction between the body as a thing and the body as an energy field.  

  

We are bound by a skin, but I dont think that is the limit of human presence.  

 

NARRATOR: 

Looking at the work, you wonder: is this a figure coming together — or is its energy extending outward, becoming part of its surroundings?  

 

GORMLEY:  

I think we are all totally dependent on the extraordinarily delicate matrix of time and space that contains us. Lets think about the body as a place rather than as an object. 

 

NARRATOR: 

Quantum Cloud may suggest a charged atmosphere, possibly an energy, a potential we carry with or around us. It asks us to check in with our selves. 

   

GORMLEY:  

I like this phrase, The unthought known, the fact that we have within us an infinitude of potential and that art can be an agency through which that potential becomes connected.

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Other Works by Antony Gormley

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