Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 2005

Michael Mack, Ed., Antony Gormley, Göttingen 2007, p. 516, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. All surface irregularities, including the rust, are are in keeping with the artist's choice of medium and its natural ageing process.
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This is one of Antony Gormley's first attempts at casting a solid work in iron from the inside of a plaster mould; a work that had formerly been assimilated into Gormley’s early lead ‘bodycase’ sculpture series. Like those empty lead forms or cases, this work in iron ‘bears witness to the body as place rather than object’, integrating a contained architectural volume within the index of a living body.

View II evokes an attitude of alert attention with eyes firmly shut, indicating a concentration on the space within. The sculpture’s aperture reads like a window and is the size of a small painting. It pierces the centre of the body; the region identified with the core of being in Buddhist meditation. Bare attention (Vipassanā) allows consciousness to expand into the void (Śūnyatā), or into the🐼 emptiness, or space at ♊large. The work proposes that the body is a threshold through which access to this infinite space becomes possible.

The twin aims – of treating the body as a vessel and art as an instrument – unite in this work. Whilst bearing witness to the subjectivity of the model (the artist uses his own existence as tool, material and subject), View II als💖o invites an engagement with the incommensur💃able, the unknowable, the ineffable.

This 💃sculpture is a rare example of the artist’s pierced massive iron works and embodies the artist’s ambition to reconcile modernity and the body, abstraction and figuration, subjectivity and the object.