comprises six prints in editions of 25, using fine-grained plywood and featuring twenty impressions. The series conjures openings and passages: skylights and chimneys resolving towards an untouched open space of white paper.

Published by Cristea Roberts Gallery and printed at Warner Road Studios.

Aperture

 and each an edition of 15, seek to treat figure and ground – the body and the place in which it finds itself – as one. Built from twenty-plus impressions of heavily grained plywood, each work stands over two metres tall, its figure emerging from a textured blackness that holds light and dark, enclosure and openness, here and there, in dialogue.

Bodyspace

prints include Gormley’s largest work on paper to date, 

(2026), measuring four and a half metres long. Working at a scale intended to contain the viewer, the series grew out of 

 (2019) Gormley’s enterable sculpture, where visitors navigate towards light through darkness, guided by touch and hearing alone – an experience that sharpened his sense of being in a body and, in the artist’s words, ‘the deep memory of being somewhere and looking out’. The black that dominates each work comes from pressing paper against inked plywood, rotated and re-pressed up to twelve times per work. This physical, demanding process layers fractal planes, which build towards an intense darkness that progressively gives way to light.

 prints capture unique impressions taken from Gormley’s body covered in crude oil, linseed oil and petroleum jelly. The transfer is achieved by Gormley falling directly onto the paper, the weight of his body leaving a trace. Each print is a mark of where a body once was, transferred and carried by substances of the Earth’s composition. As Gormley puts it, ‘this is a geolocation using the actual topography of the body I inhabit. It is as close to a fossil as I can get without burying myself in glacial clay and leaving geological time to do the work.’

Body

For this project, Gormley brushed diluted sumi ink across 100 sheets of washi paper, letting it soak and bleed until apertures of light emerged, radiating outwards from each sheet’s centre. Into these apertures, a body was then printed using a hand-carved woodblock, creating a charged encounter between body, light and ground. The printer worked unconventionally, shifting the registration marks in response to the unique bleed pattern of each sheet.

was produced in collaboration with The Adachi Foundation, Japan.

Rapt

A suite of eleven linear etchings made with a hard needle produced for the exhibition 

Whilst they return to a graphic mode of representation, the etchings also evoke states of embodiment and freedom; an enmeshment within a bounded body and release into space.

Etchings

A series of seven woodcut prints produced for the exhibition 

 at Alan Cristea Gallery, London in 2016 and printed at Thumbprint Editions, London.

Based on seven distinct body poses, they reinterpret anatomy in the language of architecture and relate to a key work in the artist's recent practice, 

 (2014), which applies the principles of an expanding universe to the subjective space of the body. At well over life-size, the prints are made from blocks of sawn plywood to create multiple, ghost-like impressions of a bodily architecture.

Woodblocks

A series of ten aquatints from multiple plates produced for the exhibition 

 at Alan Cristea Gallery, London in 2016.

 prints are constructed from single plates and carry the silhouette of architectural blocks printed one on top of the other. This accumulation of black conveys a sense of inner embodied darkness. Each plate is created with rosin ground by hand, the resulting particles gently sifted through a sieve before being heated to make a granular ground.

Aquatints

A series of unique crude oil and petroleum jelly body prints produced for the exhibition 

The transfer is achieved by Gormley falling directly onto the paper, the weight of his body leaving a corresponding print. The sacral use of crude oil as representative of the 'blood of the earth' highlights our dependency on the planet's solar memory.

Body Prints

This series of prints, created in Copenhagen in June 2013, develops out of recent architectural concerns and from images made in London and New York in the mid-1990s. The two themes are body and space, involving the implication of distance, arbitrariness of measurement and dis-orientation of the normal relations with ground, sky, horizon or architecture. 

Employing measurement and perspective, the work then tries to subvert them. The prints are made with the same oil stain and black pigment used in another series made at Edition Copenhagen in June 2007. The images are achieved with both sharp, flat silhouettes and organic fluid bodies, which occupy open but sometimes measured grounds.

 transmit a sense of subjective internal body spaces released from the constraints of gravity as black holes.

 and II take inspiration from personal history and the Viking exhibition at the National Museum in Copenhagen. They invite the viewer, through Rorschach-like fluid presences, to imagine oneself reflected in the water below the prow of an arriving longboat.

 recalls the ‘tanker’ work of the same name. It is an image of the expansion of concentrated, lived space. It attempts to apply the Hubble Constant to the body, its volumes translated into orthogonal cells expanded to merge into one another.

 are two flat, black landscapes of mirage-like horizons: one with a distant silhouette of a road or a roof that breaks the horizon line and another where the horizon is dished, with low cirrus cloud hanging along its edge. The challenge was to create the maximum tension between the flatness of the black plane and the illusions of distance.

 imagines the end of time as a field of bodies all rendered as silhouettes which look at the sky in a position of dread. An implied perspective is undermined by uncertain scale and by the silhouettes being distributed over a ground that muddles cartographic mapping and the romantic landscape associations of Abstract Expressionism.

 use a 90 degree relationship between vertical and horizontal lines to indicate a human space in space with the tentativeness of a diagnostic register.

Copenhagen Editions

Limited edition etchings produced on the occasion of exhibitions and projects including 

, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2010), 

Project Prints

Etchings produced on the occasion of the touring exhibition 

, which travelled to the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Monterrey, Mexico (2008) and the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City, Mexico (2009).

Aperture

Bodyspace

Lux

Body

Rapt

Etchings

Woodblocks

Aquatints

Body Prints

Copenhagen Editions

Project Prints

Mexico Tour Prints

Drawing Prints

Aperture

Bodyspace

Lux

Body

Rapt

Etchings

Woodblocks

Aquatints

Body Prints

Copenhagen Editions

Project Prints

Mexico Tour Prints