The first thing that comes to mind when looking at Anthony Gormley’s As Above So Below I (1986), a drawing with oil and charcoal that’s part of “Witness” at White Cube Mason’s Yard is, naturally, da Vinci. Gormley’s drawing of a human form with outstretched, angular limbs feels like an echo of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (1490). But where da Vinci’s drawing, inspired by the writing of a Roman architect, is designed to let the artist explore what he considered to be ideal human proportions, Gormley’s work is stranger, more uncanny. The figures in As Above So Below are flipped; what seems at first glance to be a face appears not just at the top of the image, but in the middle, where the hips and groins of these two figures are joined. One figure has its arms fully extended, while the other is angular. There’s nothing ideal about this overlaying of bodies, and at times, it barely even feels human.
It’s this relationship to humanity, which isn’t a complete lack, but instead a kind of gradual letting go of it, a gesture towards whatever might lie beyond our current, fleshy forms, that animates “Witness,” alongside several other recent exhibitions of sculpture in London and beyond. In one room of White Cube Mason’s Yard are a series of Gormley’s vast, lead sculptures; all apart from each other, like a group of people frozen in a moment of conflict. But more than that, none of them are looking at each other, and some seem to be further away from the memory of human forms than others. In one corner of the room is Witness II (1993), a figure sitting with its arms folded and head down, buried beneath heavy limbs; in the centre of the room is Home and the World II (1986-96), a human, or at least human-adjacent, figure standing tall, frozen in motion. But atop their neck isn’t a head but a vast structure, what looks like a letterbox, and seems to be longer than the figure itself is tall. These two, sharing space with other lead figures, seem to capture some kind of trajectory—an idea of what might become of the human form, and how difficult it would be for us to acknowledge or even simply comprehend it. Seeds II (1989/93) is a series of lead fragments that look like a pile of bullets, but the name of the piece implies something else: that this material, which is the source of life for Gormley’s structures, is also the genesis of some new, strange form that is at once human and something beyond it. The emphasis here is on the weight of it; the heavy materiality of a physical form. This feels echoed in the sculptures of Ivana Bašić, in the recent show “Temptations of Being” at Albion Jeune. In Hypostasis (2024), a blown glass, dust-covered sculpture reminiscent of the eggs and birthing pods that appear throughout science fiction (perhaps most famously in The Matrix), a race-car exhaust hose lingers inside the glass, the genesis of what feels like a living thing and almost certainly not human. It’s even tempting to draw a line from the lead of Gormley’s Seeds to the exhaust hose that lingers inside Hypostasis, these deeply artificial materials creating a new, synthetic life form that is both flesh and not.
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In White Cube’s other space, in Bermondsey, another sculptural retrospective pushes against the limits of what might become of the human form. The most dynamic, surprising aspects of “Metamorphosis – A Retrospective,” a decades-spanning showing of work by Richard Hunt, are those that capture most viscerally that feeling of being in-between; something that feels both human and not, excavated from history but somehow still pointing toward an imagined future. Hero’s Head (1956), a sculpture of what, at first glance, appears to be a human head, on a stainless steel base, like something long forgotten being excavated. Here, the eponymous head is fused to the helmet, flesh and technology merging into one form. This feels echoed in Gormley’s Home and the World II, where what begins as a human form changes into something else through the intervention of something more sculpted or technological. But where Hero’s Head presents something static, like a relic, Growth Form (1957) freezes the process of transformation in time; the long, thin columns of welded steel leading up to a strange, minute figure with a face shaped like a crescent moon and short, slender limbs. The sculpture itself looms over those coming to look at it, and yet the figure at the top isn’t looking down to meet our gaze (if, indeed, it has eyes in the same way that we do). Instead, its abstract visage and outstretched limbs are looking up, beyond us and towards the heavens, as if its next form, or the next step in our evolution, might be out there waiting to be discovered.
If Gormley’s sculptures present forms that are easily recognisable as human but with the language of a different material—the 1983 piece Untitled (Sleeping Figure) lies down looking at the sky, resting the back of its head on a rock the way a softer human might use a pillow in bed, or a bundled up shirt while gazing at the summer sun—then Hunt challenges us to look at his work and find traces of a familiar humanity within it. Opposed Linear Forms (1961) looks at first like abstracted fragments of welded steel coming together with the beginning of a gesture of communication. But the longer you look at it, the more these uncertain forms look almost like human figures. The curvature of their peaks takes on the shape of a face in the same way as Growth Form, and their entangled, metallic ends look like two people holding hands. But these sculptures, with their fragmented, almost uncertain relationship to the human form must have an ending, a point at which any traces of what we can see and recognise ourselves within finally disappear. This point seems to be reached in “The Spin Off,” an exhibition of work by Rafał Zajko at Focal Point.
As the title of Zajko’s exhibition suggests, “The Spin Off” imagines the idea of what comes next, with the title drawn from the way in which things spin off from films, TV shows and other forms of art. Much of the work here takes its name from films that have been remade—including Solaris, Funny Games and A Star is Born—a sense of the past being written over like a palimpsest, not just of culture, but of humanity. It’s through this language that Zajko explores exactly what human flesh might spin off to in its next iteration. Larder II (2025) is comprised of an almost overwhelming number of materials—including bio resin, bronze, stoneware and pickles—and within its case (the front of which feels retrofuturist; cryptic and alien, something that could have been) are small spheres of material which feel similar to Gormley’s Seeds and Bašić’s Hypostasis: something that might contain the genesis of a new form, something that might have once been human. But beyond that, “The Spin Off” contains work that has explicitly left any trace of humanity behind. The small, blinking red light at the centre of A Star is Born (2025), a vast piece that consumes an entire wall of Focal Point, housed in a transparent circle at the centre of the impenetrable perimeter of concrete, seems to directly reference HAL-9000, the sinister supercomputer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a creation famous for its desire to shed off the humans from the ship, with its monotone delivery of “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” But in the context of “The Spin Off,” Zajko’s Star is more than just a reference to Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece. Here, it’s a point on a map, a sense of what might be waiting for us countless centuries, or even millennia down the line, as we continue to evolve and transform. There’s a tactility to Zajko’s sculptures; they literally aren’t as cold and heavy as work by artists like Gormley and Hunt, and it’s this relative softness, the sense that they might be yielding if touched, that makes them feel strangely human. That they could be as soft and fragile as our flesh, some version of us if different evolutionary choices had been made.
Solaris (2025) is made of melted church candles; like the various spin-offs that lend their names to Zajko’s works in this exhibition, it takes the materiality of the past and transform it into something else. Among all this are fragments of humanity, whether in the uncanny fleshiness of the Larder series or the literal materials used in Solaris. But humanity as we understand it doesn’t exist here, although it might have done once, a long time ago. Through exhibitions like “The Spin Off,” “Metamorphosis” and “Witness,” a tension is revealed in these strange, sculptured figures, an uncertainty in their relationship to us. The more time spent looking at them, the more it seems that they might be suggesting that we, with our soft flesh, mortal coils and all too human intelligence, might not be as long for this world as we might hope, daring us to consider what comes next for us, and what might happen if the versions of ourselves that we strain to see when looking at Growth Form or Home and the World II became obsolete, frozen in time and waiting to be excavated like one of Hunt’s welded steel helmets.
Anthony Gormley’s “Witness: Early Lead Works” at White Cube Mason’s Yard closes on June 8, 2025. Richard Hunt’s “Metamorphosis – A Retrospective” is on view at White Cube Bermondsey through June 29, 2025.
