I want to activate space. I want the indwelling in relation to the body to be transferred to the spaces themselves. I want to challenge the assumptions of the site of galleries and museums and in doing so, make them more open. Their slight removal from the world gives them the potential to be a laboratory for new kinds of behaviour and association that may be difficult on the street.

The ambition is to create these very slight, but literally very high-tension interventions in steel that act like tuning strings for the spaces involved. Lines that by implication, appear to break through the architecture as if infinite extensions in space.

 (2017) in Galleria Continua, a fourteenth-century space with a vaulted ceiling in San Gimignano, had one vertical and one horizontal line. For 

at Kettle’s Yard, I realised that we could add a second horizontal and echo the principle metrics for spatial description, establishing the basic x, y and z co-ordinates, the principle metrics for all architecture and certainly for Modernism. We could do it in such a way that the lines of square section steel bar would be orthogonal to each other but separated, and as we walked through the galleries, they could unite or connect different spaces. That was a breakthrough. The three lines of steel bar were under 1.3 tonnes of pressure. 

for the Royal Academy followed a similar principle: one bar ran vertically from floor to ceiling, the other two horizontally, at different heights and perpendicular to each other across and beyond the space.

It is interesting to see how people react to these lines: the idea is that the subject transfers from the object on display to the viewer and their relationship to the space as a whole.

Co-ordinate Works

, 2014, 6 mm square section mild steel bar, one horizontal and one vertical dissecting line, dimensions variable. Installation White Cube Hong Kong, 2014. Photograph by Vincent Tsang.

Co-ordinate

, 2014, 6 mm square section mild steel bar, one horizontal and one vertical dissecting line, dimensions variable. Installation view Galleri Andersson/Sandström Stockholm, 2014. Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Béranger.

Co-ordinate II

, 2017, 6 mm square section mild steel bar, one horizontal and one vertical dissecting line, dimensions variable. Installation view, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy. Photograph by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO STUDIO.

Co-ordinate III

, 2018, 6 mm square section mild steel bar, dimensions variable. Installation view, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England. Photograph by Benjamin Westoby.

Co-ordinate IV

 2019, 6 mm square section mild steel bar, two horizontal and one vertical dissecting line, dimensions variable. Installation view, House of Art, České Budějovice, Czech Republic. Photograph by Jan Mahr.

Co-ordinate V

, 2019, 5 mm square section mild steel bar, two horizontal and one vertical dissecting line, dimensions variable. Installation View, Royal Academy, 2019. Photograph by Oak Taylor-Smith.

Co-ordinate VI

, 2022, 6 mm square section mild steel bar, one horizontal and one vertical dissecting line, dimensions variable. Installation view, Museum Voorliden, 2022. Photography by Antoine van Kaam. 

Co-ordinate Works

Related content

Antony Gormley

Present

Subject