British artist Antony Gormley will release a comprehensive monograph titled "Body Buildings" in fall 2025, documenting his recent solo exhibition at Galleria Continua in Beijing and reflecting on his three-decade engagement with China's cultural and architectural landscape. The hardcover volume, set for U.S. release by Skira on October 7, 2025, brings together sculpture, drawing, and archival material to explore the evolving relationship between the human body and built environments.
The book centers around Gormley's exhibition "Body Buildings," which ran from November 14, 2024, through April 14, 2025, at the Beijing gallery. The publication foregrounds the artist's use of clay and iron—materials fundamental to both construction and the earth itself—as mediums for examining the spatial conditions of urban life. At the heart of the exhibition is "Resting Place II" (2024), an installation that anchors a broader sequence of recent works developed in response to the verticality and density of contemporary architectural contexts.
Photographic documentation of the "Body Buildings" exhibition situates Gormley's sculptures within both the gallery's architecture and the broader cityscape beyond. These pieces, often geometric and constructed from block-like volumes, trace the human figure within architectural constraints, suggesting a reciprocal influence between physical form and structural order. Rather than being illustrative, the sculptures operate as spatial propositions, articulating how the body occupies space or yields to the logic of construction.
The monograph extends this line of inquiry through the artist's drawings, many of which appear in published form for the first time in this volume. Created with media ranging from walnut ink to blood, these drawings are investigative rather than preparatory, offering a daily practice that parallels and deepens the sculptural process. Their tactile surfaces and sedimentary layers evoke both geological and corporeal processes, reinforcing the shared material language between human beings and their environment.
Alongside documentation of recent work, "Body Buildings" includes an image-based essay that traces Gormley's sustained relationship with China and its architecture, spanning from his first research trip in 1995 to major installations including "Asian Field" (2003), "Event Horizon" (2007), and "Host" (2016). The photo essay, drawn from Gormley's personal archive, follows a route from Beijing's Forbidden City to Xi'an's famous Terracotta Army, recording sites that have continued to inform the conceptual and formal underpinnings of his artistic practice.
The publication features newly commissioned essays by curator Hou Hanru and literary historian Stephen Greenblatt, whose contributions contextualize the evolution of this body of work within both regional history and a broader philosophical framework. Their writings locate Gormley's artistic inquiry within global conversations about embodiment, urbanism, and scale, providing readers with deeper insight into the artist's ongoing exploration of how sculptures and drawings can illuminate the complex relationship between the human body and architectural space.
