Antony Gormley (b. 1950)

A ‘meme’ is a cultural analogue to a gene: a form that is transmitted in thought or behaviour from one body to another, responding to conditional environments. It is self-replicating and capable of mutation. Using the miniature or model to allow the totality of a body to be seen at once, Antony Gormley’s ‘Memes’ replace anatomy with the formal language of architecture and construct volumes that articulate a range of 33 different body postures. These small works in solid iron use a formal geometric language: each sculpture is made up of 27 blocks to articulate each unique pose. The ambition of these works, in Gormley’s words, ‘is to make intelligible forms that form an abstract lexicon of body-posture, which nevertheless carry the invitation of empathy and the transmission of states of mind.’