The sculptures featured in ‘WITNESS’ trace the evolution of Gormley’s sculptural practice, from the utilisation of found objects to the incorporation of his own body, allowing for an interplay between emptiness and fullness, as well as a tension between the physical and the metaphysical. Together, the works on display serve as propositions for embodiment, vulnerability, space and presence. On the gallery’s ground floor, three early object-based lead sculptures – Land Sea and Air I (1977–79), Natural Selection (1981) and Seeds II (1989/93) – reconfigure the relationship between subject and referent, engaging in a critical enquiry that unfolds dialectics of creation and destruction, presence and absence. The earliest of these, Land Sea and Air I, consists of a trio of lead-wrapped, rock-like forms, prefiguring its later, figurative iteration Land Sea and Air II (1982). The work originated from a single granite rock, discovered by Gormley on a beach along Ireland’s west coast, which became the prototype for encasing three elemental forms in lead: one enclosing the original stone, another holding water, and the third containing air. Extracted from their original site and sealed within lead casings – thus removed from the register of the visible – these materials undergo a transformation that, in Gormley’s words, transposes them ‘from substance to imagination: from matter to mind’.

In Natural Selection and Seeds II, lead’s intrinsic malleability – its ability to assume both hard and soft forms – becomes a site of convergence between human instruments and biospheric formations. Gormley regards this negotiation as one that ‘offers hope of balance and some form of integration between evolution and destruction.’ In the former work, 24 lead-encased objects – 12 natural, 12 human-made – are arranged along the gallery floor in descending scale, from the largest, a sphere, to the smallest, a pea-sized form. At the midpoint of this spectrum, the proximity of two near-identical shapes – a goose egg and a grenade – establishes an uncanny kinship, emphasised by their morphological likeness. This interplay recurs in Seeds II, where small, 45 mm lead handgun bullets are gathered in a heap, evoking the form of a grain pile – a theme that extends into the two wall-based works in the ground floor gallery. Shield II (1978), exhibited here for the first time, is a disc-like form composed of soldered-together lead fragments, while Mask (1978) preserves the impression of a machete, created by draping a lead sheet over the object. An instrument primarily associated with deforestation, its absence is signified by the cut-out silhouette of its hooked tip, exposing the wall behind it.

Translating a range of figurative poses, five discrete body sculptures in the lower ground floor gallery become vessels of receptivity, attuning us to the subtle interrelations between body, presence and the spatial environment. Upon entering the gallery, we encounter Close I (1992), the only fully enclosed form among the exhibited body cases. Pressed face-down to the ground, with its limbs splayed as if embracing the earth, it appears both anchored and exposed. Enacting a full-bodied surrender, the absolute proximity between body and planet – two sites of being – draws them into and foregrounds their mutual dependency, bound by their shared gravitational pull. Extending this meditation, two early works from 1983 expand on the body’s dialogue with the external world, tracing its synergy with intangible fields. In the first, Untitled (Listening Figure), a seated figure cups one hand to its ear, where a small aperture opens into the sculpture’s recessed darkness. Gormley drew inspiration from the 11th-century Tibetan siddha Milarepa, who, as he describes, would ‘listen for the echo of his own voice rebounding across mountain valleys from his Himalayan cave in Nyalam’. Nearby, Untitled (Sleeping Figure) reclines with its head resting on a granite boulder, evoking a state of repose. In a parallel act of reference, Gormley associates the work with the biblical story of Jacob’s vision of a celestial ladder bridging earth and heaven. The figure’s hands, resting palms-down on the chest, and its parted feet lend a numinous symmetry to its stillness, while two small holes at the nose reinforce the notion of the body as a conduit between physical and transcendent realms. As Gormley reflects, ‘I have always thought of the darkness of the body as being equivalent to the darkness of the universe.’

Intersecting these grounded figures, Home and the World II (1986–96) asserts a striking verticality. A singular striding form, its head is replaced by an elongated, house-shaped structure extending over five metres horizontally, punctuated at either end by small windows that reveal an interior void. Despite its apparent forward motion – one foot placed before the other – the figure remains rooted, embodying the tension between the body as both sanctuary and a vessel of perpetual displacement, engaging notions of habitation, constraint and the reciprocal shaping of body and environment. Unlike the seated or prone bodies in the gallery, it shares its elevated spatial orientation with Blanket Drawing I (1983). To make this work, Gormley pressed white clay into a hospital blanket around an empty silhouette of his body lying prone in the untouched wool. Lifted from the floor and pinned to the wall, the impression undergoes a perceptual shift – what once suggested rest is now reanimated, the figure’s head breaking beyond the blanket’s edge like a swimmer gasping for air.

Tucked into a corner of the gallery, Witness II (1993) – the work that lends its name to the exhibition – absorbs its surroundings while remaining self-contained, its form reminiscent of an ancient, seated scribe. Though enclosed, small openings at the ears suggest a body attuned to its environment – registering movement, sound and activity while maintaining a state of profound stillness. Here, stillness does not equate to withdrawal but rather a deepened immersion in the sensory field, functioning as both probe and conduit, mapping the ambient reverberations and unseen frequencies of site and space. Reflecting Gormley’s late-20th-century preoccupations amid the threat of nuclear catastrophe, Witness II – like all the lead sculptures in this exhibition – materialises his enduring enquiry into the potency of sculpture’s intrinsic stillness and silence, celebrating its capacity to serve as an instrument through which we examine our own condition. A ‘gift from the past’, he writes, these forms hold both memory and the potential to become ‘a seed of the future’.

‘WITNESS Early Lead Works’ is curated by Susan May.

Antony Gormley (b. 1950, London) is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.

​Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2024); Musée Rodin, Paris (2023); Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany (2022); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands (2022); National Gallery Singapore (2021); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); Delos, Greece (2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy (2019); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania (2019); Long Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Forte di Belvedere, Florence, Italy (2015); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (2014); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasília (2012); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2012); The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1993); and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (1989). Permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, UK), Another Place (Crosby Beach, UK), Inside Australia (Lake Ballard, Western Australia), Exposure (Lelystad, the Netherlands), Chord (MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge) and Alert (Imperial College London).

​Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007, the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2013. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year’s Honours list in 2014. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge, UK. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003.