
Exposure Opens in Lelystad, The Netherlands
Permanently sited one kilometre from the shore of Lelystad on the dyke that connects Friesland and Flevoland, Exposure is Gormley’s largest and most complex singular sculptural project, standing 25 metres high and weighing 60 tonnes. The work attempts to evoke the body as a place, transforming his sculptural language from a defined closed surface to an open three-dimensional drawing in space that maps the inner volume of the body and establishes a link between body and space at large. Exposure is a collective expression in more than one sense: a body made out of 5,000 elements, each of which has a unique position and length. The structure is a random matrix with no defined load path and no orthogonal construction logic, with the elements in a variety of angle-sections connected in 547 nodes with 14,000 bolts. Its complexity has evolved through both physical and digital models over a three and half year project, during which the artist collaborated with the digital design research centres at Cambridge University, University College London and Royal Haskoning, culminating with the manufacture of the work in Scotland by the pylon manufacturers Had-Fab. The sculpture has taken 18 months to fabricate and install.
Photograph: Exposure, Lelystad, The Netherlands. Installation view. Photograph by Allard Bovenberg, Amsterdam.