Antony Gormley takes over the KMSKA — roof, square and quays included
"My work asks the questions: what can sculpture do and what does it feel like to be alive?" Antony Gormley has been asking them for fifty years, in lead and iron and cast bodies, and in public works — the Angel of the North in Gateshead, Exposure in Lelystad — that people who never enter a museum still know by sight.
Until 20 September the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp gives him the building. Geestgrond was made for the KMSKA and is curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the former artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13). It runs to more than a hundred works, from early sketches to enterable sculptures, and it does not stay indoors: the exhibition continues onto the roof, across the museum square and out to the quays.
The Dutch word geestgrond names the fertile sandy soil left in the Low Countries by the Ice Age. It also splits neatly into mind and ground, spirit and matter, which is the argument of the show. Gormley's sculptures are placed in conversation with the museum's own Rodin, Ensor and Julio González, on the premise that body and consciousness, person and surroundings, do not come apart.
Two rooms carry the weight. The penultimate one, The Heart, is a Wunderkammer of early works, notebooks, drawings, photographs, raw materials and abandoned experiments — the working method laid open. The route then ends at Cave (2019), a body built like a building out of vast steel sheets, filling the room and asking to be walked into.
For the museum it is also a statement of intent. "For the first time since its reopening in 2022, the modern galleries will be used entirely as exhibition space," says chairman Luk Lemmens. "With this project, we are not only exploring the boundaries of the museum building itself, but also venturing into public space."
Antony Gormley. Geestgrond runs from 23 May to 20 September 2026 at the KMSKA, Leopold de Waelplaats 1, Antwerp.
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Photos: KMSKA, Antwerp