The exhibition is a retrospective of Antony Gormley’s 45-year career and includes small sculpture, experiential installations, drawings and sketch books. The quantity of work is quite overwhelming and though the works themselves are physically very different the feeling of claustrophobia or alienation I had is very similar between the rooms filled with steel installations and masses of drawings or sketchbooks filling other galleries. I was impressed how the works had been installed but at the same time felt the focus should be on the art and not cost of mounting this at the RA or the cleverness of the structural engineering.

The works are very male in the way they fill up the space and are all based on Gormley’s own body. But despite the feeling of alienation I had because of this I still managed to find some works surprisingly profound, in particular the small and quite simple drawings of a man in a huge landscape and the human size image made on paper using casein. Though they feel very self-consciously ‘meaningful’ trying to address issue of what it is to be human and mortal, these did affect me. In particular the materials Gormley uses are very interesting to me at the moment because as well as being used to depict the body they also give a sense of the corporeal and this is something I am currently considering. Specifically, his use of casein and pigment in rabbit skin glue as a drawing medium are very successful in this way. The large full body ‘drawing’ or body impression made using casein (and pigment?) evoked ideas of bodily fluids through its colour and texture but also recalled images of the Turin shroud.