© Antony Gormley
Coinciding with the fourth edition of Frieze Seoul, Thaddaeus Ropac and White Cube to present Inextricable, a two-part exhibition by Antony Gormley.
The artist’s debut solo show in the city follows the opening of his major projects ‘Drawing on Space’ and ‘Ground’ at Museum SAN, in Wonju, in summer 2025.
Inextricable infiltrates the public realm and its inner shelter to interrogate the entanglement between humanity and the city – a relationship so thoroughly inscribed that, as the artist states, ‘the world now builds us.’ The exhibition opens at a time when more than half the global population lives within the urban grid – a figure the United Nations projects will rise to a further 70% by 2050. Positioned as both reflection and provocation, the exhibition is a test site, talking directly to the materials and methods of the city and creating a resonance between the space of the body and its surroundings.
The works at Thaddaeus Ropac, in Seoul’s Hannam district, interrogate the body’s internal condition and its embeddedness within domestic spaces. Three ‘Extended Strapworks’, Dwell (2022), Now (2024) and Here (2024), break the body’s boundary and reach out towards the edges of the spaces they inhabit, recognising how a room’s orthogonality affects our internal perception of space. The sculptures’ looping steel ribbons enact the recursive logic of the Möbius strip, folding interior and exterior into a continuous interface and collapsing distinctions between form and field, subject and environment. Two of the sculptures stretch across the floor and walls, registering the gallery’s linear geometries as active components in their spatial logic, while also referencing architectural apertures – doorways and windows – that mediate between inside and outside.
© Antony Gormley
© Antony Gormley
© Antony Gormley
Two ‘Open Blockworks’ titled Open Daze (2024) and Home (2025) revisit the modular structure developed in Gormley’s ‘Blockworks’, reconfiguring the block into open, cellular frameworks that remain porous and responsive to their environment. Both works call upon the viewer’s inquisitiveness and bodily engagement. Installed in the lower gallery, a group of ‘Knotworks’ map body-space, recalling the connective infrastructures that underpin the built world – plumbing, circuitry and transit routes – rendering the body part of these broader networks. Referencing Gormley’s formative installation Testing a World View (1993), each sculpture is pressed against the floor, walls or ceiling.
© Antony Gormley
© Antony Gormley
© Antony Gormley
At White Cube, located in Seoul’s busy Cheongdam district, six sculptures from Gormley’s ongoing ‘Bunker’, ‘Beamer’ and ‘Blockwork’ series transform the body through the syntax of the built environment. Outside the gallery, two life-sized cast iron ‘Blockworks’ give form to moments of bodily stillness. Standing sentinel on the curb between the pedestrian walkway and traffic-filled road, Swerve IV (2024) asserts a physical presence that prompts bodily awareness, while – true to its title – disrupting the flow of the surrounding human traffic. The second ‘Blockwork’, Cotch XIII (2024), articulating a contemplative seated posture, is perched on a low wall. The elemental density of Gormley’s cast iron ‘Blockworks’ serves to ground them both physically and conceptually, affirming the body’s imbrication with the planet.
Retreat: Slump (2022) is also positioned outside. Sitting within a narrow public corridor and surrounded by towering developments, it confronts pedestrian flow with its fortified, selfcontained presence. With a small, square orifice at the position of the mouth offering a glimpse into the dark void within, Retreat: Slump is a quiet redress of our condition, expressing the ‘infinite darkness’ available to us once the body is still – a state Gormley considers the most potent site of personal freedom Bridging the space between exterior and interior, Pluck 2 (2024), a life-sized ‘Beamer’ sculpture, is squeezed into the narrow gap between the gallery’s glass façade and its inner wall. Here, Gormley draws attention to ‘art’s position in the shop window of mercantile exchange’.
Inside, Big Slew (2024) is almost completely concealed behind a column in the first room, while Big Form III (2024) crouches just beyond the threshold of the second. Constructed from interlocking steel beams arranged along the three Cartesian axes, the ‘Beamer’ works translate bodily mass into the linear language of architecture, questioning how those same geometries shape, constrain and choreograph our behaviour within the built world. These ruminations on the nature of our species as urban animals are complemented by a series of recent drawings that render the domains of body-space and architecture as shared fields of perception – orientations from which we look out, towards light and the spatial expanse beyond.
Seoul provides a compelling context for Gormley’s investigation. As South Korea’s most populous city – and one of the so-called ‘Four Asian Tigers’ alongside Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan – its dramatic transformation from post-war austerity to global industrial powerhouse is writ large in its vertical sprawl and dense infrastructures. Yet this condition reflects a broader global paradigm in which much of humanity now dwells – one in which the urban topography does not merely surround us, but imprints itself upon us, shaping the comportment of our bodies as well as the contours of our interior landscape. Within this shifting terrain, ‘Inextricable’ proposes art as both a means of attuning us to the coconstitution of body and habitat, and a catalyst for deeper awareness of our changed nature.
Can art be a catalyst for a wider awareness? Can it be the tool for the realisation of our changed nature and attempt to bring it to conscious experience? This is art made in the hope that it might make us more alive, alert and aware of the very changes that are happening all around us, in our minds and souls as much as in the comportment of our bodies. ‘Inextricable’ materialises how our bodies are now tethered to the architectures of our habitat.
– Antony Gormley
Antony Gormley Inextricable Thaddaeus Ropac, 2nd September – 8th November 2025 and at White Cube Seoul, 2nd September -18th October 2025.
Antony Gormley: Drawing on Space is on view concurrently at Museum SAN, Wonju, South Korea until 30th November. It runs alongside Ground the artist’s first collaboration with architect Tadao Ando.
About the Artist
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 Museum SAN, Wonju, South Korea (2025); 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 and in 2025 he was appointed Companion of Honour for his services to art in the King’s Birthday Honours list. 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.
