Antony Gormley: Geestgrond at KMSKA

The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) presents the largest survey of Antony Gormley’s work ever staged in continental Europe. Running from 23 May to 20 September 2026, Geestgrond brings together more than 100 works spanning over four decades of the British sculptor’s career, installed not just in the galleries but threaded through the museum’s architecture and engaging with other works in the museum’s collection.

Gormley, born in London in 1950, has spent nearly fifty years asking a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to be a body in the world? Since the late 1970s, his sculptures — often cast from his own body — have used clay, iron, lead, steel, glass, and even bread to explore how humans occupy and relate to space. Gormley has become one of the most recognizable names in contemporary sculpture, and Geestgrond offers an opportunity to discover the full arc of his practice, from early experiments to newer pieces like Attend (2025) and Orbit Field III (2026), a tangle of aluminum rings that turns an entire room into a kind of gravitational field.

Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who has an extensive background in Arte Povera, and rooted in rigorous scholarship with an appetite for the experimental, comes to his project as a curator as well as a collaborator. Both Gormley and Christov-Bakargiev worked together on finding how his sculptures might speak to KMSKA’s own holdings, including works by James Ensor, Auguste Rodin, and Julio González, as well as medieval sculpture from the museum’s collection.

That dialogue extends to the show’s title. Geestgrond fuses the Dutch words geest (spirit, mind, breath) and grond (earth, soil, foundation), a term that also refers, geologically, to the sandy soils of the Low Countries shaped by glaciation and centuries of cultivation. It’s a fitting metaphor for Gormley’s work, which has always tried to root the immaterial — thought, consciousness, in something physical and grounded.

Christov-Bakargiev wrties: “What if sculpture could breathe? What if art did not just stand before you but stood with you, quietly shifting how you inhabit space, time, and self? Come to ‘Geestgrond’ not to see answers, but to feel possibilities. Come to experience and be moved. This exhibition explores the need for art to address the human condition in our era of radical change. What does it mean to be human in an age of AI? Can sculpture help us become more present and more rooted?”

She frames the exhibition as a response to a specific moment — one shaped by rapid technological change and questions about what AI means for human identity. A section titled “The Heart” leans into this directly, gathering Gormley’s notebooks, sketches, travel photographs, and annotated books into what she calls a dataset of a single human being: the artist’s own archive, presented almost as a counterpoint to the abstractions of machine learning. KMSKA’s General Director, Carmen Willems, points to the fit between Gormley’s practice and the museum’s own identity as a place where old and new collide — historic galleries alongside recently renovated modern wings. Gormley, she notes, is an artist who activates the spaces he enters, inviting visitors to move through his work rather than simply look at it.

An illustrated catalogue accompanies the show, edited by Christov-Bakargiev, with over 275 plates, a new curatorial essay, a chronology-anthology by Michael Green and Liesje Vandenbroeck, and what’s billed as the first scholarly compilation of Gormley’s body-casting techniques.

Antony Gormley. Geestgrond runs at KMSKA from 23 May through 20 September 2026.

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