Selected Artworks. Part 1

Antony GormleyStem IV, 2021Cast iron151.6 x 61.5 x 70.5 cm Gormley has spent his career exploring the human body's relationship to space, with his "Angel of the North", steel, winged behemoth installed on a hill in northeastern England in 1998, catapulting him to fame. Gormley insists his figures contain no narratives and are not trying to tell a story, but exist to stir up feelings in viewers."Your body is actually the most highly sensitive instrument that you have in order to experience the world," as the author says. Movement is more evident in his latest series of works. Decades into his life as an artist and devoted to a single theme, he describes his work as a stem, constantly budding with new possibilities.

Louise BourgeoisUntitled, 2004Aluminium171 x 108 x 92 cm Bourgeois explained: ‘The two dimensions do not satisfy me. I have to have the reality given by the third dimension.’ Delicately suspended, ‘Untitled’ exudes the sophistication and tenderness characteristic of Bourgeois’ rich oeuvre, which spanned seven decades. Using the body as her primary form, Bourgeois explored the full range of human experience in a variety of mediums, from intimate drawings to large-scale installations; sculpture, however, was always at the forefront of her practice.

Shirazeh Houshiary
Since rising to prominence as a sculptor in the 1980s, the British-Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary’s practice has swelled to encompass painting, installation, architectural projects and film. Veils, membranes and mists are leitmotifs in work that tries to visualise modes of perception, spanning the scientific and the cosmic while drawing on sources as wide-ranging as Sufism, Renaissance painting, contemporary physics and poetry. Her ritualistic, hand-drawn latticed inscriptions referencing the meditative, transcendentalist function of fractal geometric patterns in both nature and art.

Mark GrotjahnUntitled (Tuscan Red and Grey Green Light Butterfly 53.33), 2020Colour pencil on paper190 x 100 cmThis artwork beautifully exemplifies Mark Grotjahn’s adroit manipulation of perspective, drawn from his celebrated series of “Butterfly” drawings and paintings that commenced in 2001. In these works, the artist investigates the possibilities of employing dual or multiple vanishing points, in an effort to heighten the constructed image’s intensity and convey a quasi-hallucinogenic effect. Alternating bands of red and grey-green have meticulously been drawn with coloured pencils by the artist.

Thomas Ruff
d.o.pe.04 I, 2022
Colaris on velour carpet
267.3 × 198.8 cm
Ruff’s d.o.pe. series, the title of which references Aldous Huxley’s autobiographical volume The Doors of Perception, published in 1954, feature fractal patterns that the artist creates with a specialized software program that are printed onto industrial carpets. These works reflect Ruff’s ongoing pursuit of the visual expression of the beauty of mathematics. Further recalling the highly detailed and exuberant Northern Renaissance style of artists such as Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grünewald, d.o.pe. extends Ruff’s exploration of human perception and his interest in creating digital imagery that appears at once natural and artificial, ultimately foregrounding the pure pleasure of visuality and of looking.