Casting the Soul: Antony Gormley’s Sculptures

This paper aims at exploring how Antony Gormley, by casting a real body, manages to represent both the depth of the human body and the mystery of the human being. A body cast like Learning to See can be a case in point. The lead sculpture, whose closed eyes seem to be observing the inside of its body, contains air as indicated in the list of materials. Air can symbolise the soul that inhabits the body. The visible and the invisible, materiality and immateriality, the outside and the inside are poetically intertwined in Gormley’s works to breathe life into his statues.