CCBB São Paulo, SP; Rio de Janeiro, RJ; Brasília, DF

2012

Executive Production

Winner of the 1994 Turner Prize and one of the greatest living sculptors, 61-year-old Englishman Antony Gormley has built up one of the most coherent aesthetic investigations in contemporary art. Brazil finally had the chance to get to know his work up close through the exhibition Corpos Presentes – Still Beings, which landed in São Paulo on 12 May 2012 and occupied the entire building of the Banco do Brasil Cultural Centre, with the aim of providing an overview of his career. Designer and documentary maker Marcello Dantas curated the event, which ran until 15 June in the city and continued in 2012 to Rio de Janeiro and Brasília.

The exhibition featured 11 works, 50 models, nine prints, 25 photos and six videos. One of the works, the intriguing installation Event Horizon – which has already been exhibited in London in 2007 and New York in 2010 – brought together 31 life-size sculptures of naked men in the open air. Moulded from the author’s own body, they occupied the Anhangabaú Valley, in the central region of São Paulo. By distributing them on the eaves of the buildings and inside the square, the sculptor takes the viewer out of their comfort zone and creates a landscape that interferes with their depth perception system within the public space.

The CCBB exhibited a variety of works from the artist’s collection, as well as five sculptures produced especially for the Brazilian exhibition: Loss, a human figure in natural proportions made of various steel cubes; Mother’s Pride, a re-edition of one of his oldest creations, in which he sculpts the mould of his own body by eating the inside of the painting, filled with loaves of bread; and three versions of his famous Breathing Room (one for each city hosting the exhibition).

The CCBB rotunda also hosted one of his most famous installations, CriticalMass II, from 1995, in which Gormley agglomerates and suspends 60 cast iron bodies, weighing 630kg each, in 12 different poses.

As well as the exhibition itself, for the first time in history the sculptor’s works were commercialised in Brazil. The renowned White Cube, a London gallery that represents Gormley and other artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Marc Quinn, opened a temporary branch of its business in São Paulo and promoted the Facts and Systems exhibition. The space remained active for two months in a 500 square metre building near Ibirapuera Park.