This fall, the Musée Rodin welcomes British artist Antony Gormley. For over forty years, Gormley has explored the relationship of the human body to space through a critical examination of his own body and, more recently, through an investigation of the body's relationship to the built environment.
This exhibition, entitled "Critical Mass" at the Musée Rodin, will activate all areas of the museum, including the temporary exhibition space, the gardens, the Marble Gallery and the Hotel Biron. Key works from Gormley's career will enter into dialog with Rodin's own sculptures, inviting visitors to reflect on the two sculptors and their shared investment in the question of what the body offers to sculpture as subject, object and reflexive tool.
Critical Mass II © Agence Photographique du Musée Rodin, Jérome Manouaking
At the center of this exhibition is Critical Mass II (1995), an installation of sixty life-size sculptures that characterize the temporary exhibition space and the museum's garden. In this major work, the artist isolates twelve basic positions unique to the human body, casts them five times each and then places them in different configurations, sometimes to contradictory and absurd effect. Crawling, squatting, kneeling and standing, the installation unfolds in the garden with a line of twelve positions that ends at Rodin's " The Gates of Hell".
Inside, a dense collection of cast-iron bodies, piled up in a heap, will look as if they have fallen to the ground. Other bodies are pressed against walls and hanging from the ceiling. For Gormley, "the work relates to the materiality of sculpture and our dependence on the materiality of the body, both of which are subject to position, context and danger". In addition to Critical Mass II, six of Gormley's "insider" works will populate the Marble Gallery and four carefully selected sculptures will be placed alongside Rodin's masterpieces in the Hotel Biron's permanent exhibition spaces.
October 17, 2023 to March 3, 2024
