Antony Gormley on Hayward Gallery

He also has a long affinity with our Hayward Gallery.

Gormley’s 2007 solo exhibition here at Hayward Gallery, which featured his remarkable installation Event Horizon, was also his first major showing in a public gallery in London. In 2016, during our temporary closure for refurbishment, the artist took time to share his thoughts on Hayward Gallery.

On Hayward Gallery

‘I think it’s a unique and wonderful venue for London… There’s a sense in which it doesn’t just occupy its site, it owns it. It digs itself in as part of the bank of the Thames, and as such, there is no other gallery like it, either in London or Britain.’

‘I love [Hayward Gallery] and I love it for the fact that, because it is so purposeful, it remains unique in its ability to present ideas carried through objects, either made by a singular intelligence and sensibility, or by putting objects together that have a conversation within that context.’

On its architecture

‘It’s the only place in London where I think the building itself demands a form of serious consideration, and always the best shows respond to the architecture and to the particularity and make something of it, that is both greater than the work itself and greater than the building itself. So this is the opportunity for a kind of generation of energy and of focus that simply is not offered by any other gallery.‘

‘[The Hayward Gallery is] a unique and extraordinary resource. I think of it as a concentrating chamber. The whole building is made like a skull. Cast concrete that integrates its breathing and if you like, its view of the world. Where it has windows, they are very particular. How it relates to the outer world is very particular, the three sculpture courts from which you are invited to look back at the city in which it belongs.’

On Event Horizon

‘The idea [of Event Horizon was] that you could offer people the city again, with the catalysts of these small life-sized body forms that were on the ground and then on the skyline, and invite them to look at the conversation between buildings, and think about this place, whether they were visitors or London was their home.’

On the Hayward Gallery’s sculpture terraces

‘I think the great thing about where the Hayward Gallery is, on the banks of the Thames, is it allows you to engage with London at large. And the marvellous thing about those three sculpture terraces is that they allow you to look on London itself as a representation, as a project, as a made landscape .Rather than having to make a painting of it, you can actually see the thing itself.

On the 2016-18 refurbishment of Hayward Gallery

‘I am so glad that this has happened, that the Hayward is being respected, that its original rooflights are being returned to it. The distinction between fully enclosed  spaces and spaces that will be irradiated by natural light is going to be restored. That its unique material and mass is going to be preserved for generations to come.’