Antony Gormley

Cristea Roberts Gallery is delighted to announce Where, an exhibition of over twenty new works on paper by Antony Gormley, some monumental in scale, each a direct trace of a place and a body. Presented across the gallery’s two floors, the exhibition is an attempt to both subjectivise and universalise the question, ‘Where am I?’

The show opens with a group of eight unique prints titled Lux, 2025–26, including Gormley’s largest work on paper to date, Lux I, 2026, measuring four and a half metres long. Working at a scale intended to contain the viewer, the series grew out of Cave, 2019, Gormley’s enterable sculpture, where visitors navigate towards light through darkness, guided by touch and hearing alone – an experience that sharpened his sense of being in a body and, in the artist’s words, ‘the deep memory of being somewhere and looking out’.

The black that dominates each work comes from pressing paper against inked plywood, rotated and re-pressed up to twelve times per work. This physical, demanding process layers fractal planes, which build towards an intense darkness that progressively gives way to light.

A corresponding series, Aperture, 2026, comprises six prints in editions of 25, using fine-grained plywood with nearly twice the layering, some featuring twenty impressions. Both series conjure openings and passages: skylights and chimneys resolving towards an untouched open space of white paper.

Body, 2025, captures four unique impressions taken from Gormley’s body covered in crude oil, linseed oil, and petroleum jelly. The transfer is achieved by Gormley falling directly onto the paper, the weight of his body leaving a trace. Each print is a mark of where a body once was, transferred and carried by substances of the Earth’s composition.

As Gormley puts it, ‘this is a geolocation using the actual topography of the body I inhabit. It is as close to a fossil as I can get without burying myself in glacial clay and leaving geological time to do the work.’

A final group of works comprises five life-size prints titled Bodyspace, 2026. These woodblock prints, each an edition of 15, seek to treat figure and ground – the body and the place in which it finds itself – as one. Built from twenty-plus impressions of heavily grained plywood, each work stands over two metres tall, its figure emerging from a textured blackness that holds light and dark, enclosure and openness, here and there, in dialogue.

Where proposes art as an invitational space, one from which we can look both deeply into ourselves and out to a reality that unfolds within and without us.

Marking Gormley’s second exhibition with Cristea Roberts Gallery, Where is accompanied by a catalogue featuring a new text by Steven Connor, Professor of English at King’s College London, and a conversation between Gormley and Sera Markoff, Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

Gormley also features in a new episode of the gallery’s podcast, Making a Mark, exploring contemporary artists’ approaches to drawing and printmaking.

If you would like to register your interest in receiving a list of works please contact us directly via sales@cristearoberts.com.

The exhibition will be open for extended hours on Saturday 17 October, 11am – 5.30pm. Click here for our opening hours.