This exhibition opened in Sarajevo less than three months after the Siege of Sarajevo and featured three works: 

In a letter to the Obala Art Centar in 1996, Gormley wrote of this exhibition:

‘[It] relates space and the body in a direct way without idealisation. It is difficult now to believe in unities or universals but the human body and the planet are such unities, held within different matrices: one composed of affection and expanding patterns of communication, and the other, of gravity and an expanding universe. I would like to feel that what I do celebrates what we have in common: a body that contains us but whose limits are never absolute.

In spite of all the news, I am aware of how little I know of your lives in Sarajevo and Bosnia, but I am more and more aware that meaning is constructed in the act of viewing as much as in the act of making (or causing to be made). This is the principle way in which art has changed in the last half century. Art can be a bridge and a container, but what it bridges and what it contains are mutable. Art can be a conduit and temporary focus for feelings that maybe hover, loose and unformed. Art can become an arena in which thoughts and feelings can be tested in an ever more open ground, ever more receptive to the particularity of an individual’s response. Whether my work can be this in a time and place so close to war, remains to be seen.’

Obala Art Centar

, 1996, cast iron, 35.6 × 231 × 45.7 cm.

 1996 (background), cast iron, 35.6 × 231 × 45.7 cm.

New Work: Obala 1992-1996

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