Imaginative Freedom: Antony Gormley at the Nasher Sculpture Center

Stop reading for a second and close your eyes. What do you see? In an instant, as in prayer or any meditative practice, you may sense that your body—its limbs, hair, skin, and bones—is no longer a solid, humanoid form, but something more akin to the ether, and connected to the transcendent.

“Once you lose something, you truly appreciate it,” says Jed Morse, Interim Director and Chief Curator of the Nasher Sculpture Center, when recalling his encounter with Blind Light (2007), a disorienting, immersive installation by London-born sculptor Antony Gormley. To experience Blind Light, visitors entered a glass room and were immediately enveloped in fog, losing all sense of their surroundings. “In its absence in the fog, one realizes the presence of one’s own body,” says Morse. “You gain a broader sense of the space that you’re in, and the space where you came from.”

From Sept. 13, 2025, to Jan. 4, 2026, the Nasher presents the first major museum survey of Gormley’s work in the United States, including early, experimental works stretching back to the 1980s, sculptures, maquettes, sketchbooks, and a new, major public installation that will transform the skyline of the Downtown Dallas Arts District.

Connecting the works in Survey is Gormley’s gift for creating an interactive, physical experience for the viewer, where the sculptures seem to respond to humans in the room, while provoking what he describes as the “imaginative freedom” to enjoy an experience beyond one’s senses. (Gormley’s interest in Buddhism and Vipassanā meditation dates back to the early 1970s and has informed his work to the present day.)

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Antony Gormley, 2022. Photograph by John O’Rourke.

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Antony Gormley, FLOOR, 1981. Rubber.9c 1/4 x 48 x 52 3/4 inches (0.6 x 122 x 134 cm). © Antony Gormley. Photograph by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of the artist.

 

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Antony Gormley, DRIFT VI, 2010. 2 mm square section stainless steel bar. 84 3/4 x 89 3/4 x 122 3/4 inches (215 x 228 x 312 cm). © Antony Gormley. Photograph by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of the artist.

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Antony Gormley, CLOSE V, 1998. Cast iron. 10 3/4 x 79 1/4 x 68 1/2 inches (27 x 201 x 174 cm). © Antony Gormley. Photograph by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of the artist.

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Antony Gormley, Pile I, 2017. Clay. 14 3/4 x 29 x 27 1/2 inches (37.4 x 73.5 x 69.7 cm). Installation view of Essere, Le Gallerie Degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy, 2019. © Antony Gormley. Courtesy of Galleria Continua. Photograph by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO STUDIO.

 

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Antony Gormley, FIELD, 1984–1985. Lead, fiberglass, plaster, and air. 77 1/4 x 217 x 16 1/2 inches (196 x 551 x 42 cm). © Antony Gormley. © Antony Gormley. Photograph by Antony Gormley, courtesy of the artist.

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The Nasher, which opened in 2003 and houses the Raymond and Patsy Nasher collection, featuring over 500 masterpieces of modern and contemporary sculpture, is an ideal setting for Gormley’s sculptures. Designed by the renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano, who also designed the Menil Collection and its Cy Twombly Gallery, the galleries are filled with soft, northern light, allowing the attuned viewer to see clearly and study the shape and texture of the sculpture on view. “There was a lot to consider,” says Morse when asked how the space and square footage determined which objects were selected for the exhibit. “They’re parts of a whole.”

Those parts include the new public project—sculptures that are life-size silhouettes of recognizably human figures made up of an open network of stainless-steel bars and installed on buildings visible from the Nasher’s garden. These gleaming sculptures, each the size of Gormley—who is 6’4” and throughout his career has been the model for his work—hover above the viewer and seem to touch the sky. And you can see through them. The dispersal of these figures is a response to the conditions of the body in the ever-evolving digital world that humans continue to navigate. “The figure being reduced to a field of energy is an expression of that experience,” says Morse. “It references the built environment, the digital world, and transcendent experiences.”

Over the course of his career, Gromley’s body forms have become more geometric and abstract, drawing on architectural vocabulary of the “built environment” to create figures that, as in his series Shift, at first glance look like the missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but upon closer inspection, could also be figures in repose, or segmented portions of a long buried, now unearthed metropolis. (Interestingly, as his sensitivity to the carbon footprint of art-making has grown, Gormley has stopped using concrete, the material for these “blockworks” and bunkers.)

Gormley has enjoyed international acclaim for his large-scale, outdoor sculptures. One of his best-known works, the monumental Angel of the North (1998), is 66 feet tall with a wingspan of 177 feet and can withstand wind speeds of over 100 miles per hour. This and other larger-scale works find their way into Survey in the form of maquettes and as drafts of initial inspiration in Gormley’s sketchbooks, several of which are also on view. “They contain the initial flash of an idea,” says Morse of these creative journals. “They’re about the present, but they also reach forward and backward.” The notebooks also demystify the process of making art, as they show how Gormley brings his imagined ideas to life by doing something anyone can do: doodling.

When asked, Morse confirms Gormley is, indeed, “down-to-earth,” and believes anyone can engage and experience something meaningful with his work, regardless of their knowledge of art or art history. “Part of that is the accessibility of the human figure,” says Morse. “That sense of being able to put ourselves in that place and stand outside of it is something that makes the work eminently relatable.”

—CHRIS BECKER