Humanlike sculptures are perched on Dallas rooftops. Here’s why — and where to look

From KERA News:

Six sculptures have popped up on rooftops in Dallas’ Arts District.

The approximately 6-foot human forms are part of “Survey: Antony Gormley,” a new exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center.

The show highlights the diversity of work created by the award-winning British artist who uses materials like steel, clay, concrete and fiberglass to create sculptures that examine the relationship between the human body and space.

Inside the museum there are several of the artist’s sculptures, workbooks and models of his large-scale works.

Gormley’s sculptures have been sky-high before, and his work has been shown around the world, including Beijing, New York and London. But this exhibition is the first major museum survey of his work in the U.S. to date.

The venue is fitting. Gormley is 75 now, but early in his career, his supporters were primarily American collectors like Raymond and Patsy Nasher.

The city has changed in many ways since the Nasher opened in 2003.

“It is amazing to me in the less than three decades in which this building has existed and in which I have been visiting Dallas, it has changed so fundamentally. And this rise, it’s like huge crystalline forms have grown up skywards, and it means something,” he said.

Our landscape signifies what we value as a culture, and Gormley says in some ways we have given up public space to gather in the city in favor of privacy.

He hopes that when people scan the skyline and seek out his sculptures, it will prompt them to pause and think about their environment and take note of the things we see so frequently that we stop noticing them.

Outside the museum, there are more sculptures, including the ones that dot the skyline surrounding the garden.

His sculptures on the rooftops aren’t solid. You can see the sky between the stainless steel bars fanned out and welded together in a weblike pattern. The effect is almost silhouette-like, said Jed Morse, chief curator at the Nasher.

“And it’s just kind of a bare suggestion of a human figure. When seen close up, you see that very clearly. When seen at a distance, it kind of dissolves into pure light and energy,” Morse said. 

All of these sculptures are roughly the same size. Seeing how the sculptures look in comparison to one another based on where they’re installed serves as a lesson on depth perception.

“It’s fascinating to see these works both closer to our realm down on the ground like the one on top of the Nasher Sculpture Center,” Morse said. “And then also you can pick them out a little bit farther afield on buildings around us.”

The rooftop sculptures can be kind of hard to spot if you don’t know what you’re looking for. That’s by design.

“For me, it was important that this was more of a whisper than a shout,” Gormley said.

“I wanted to use the background of a clear blue … Texan sky as the kind of endless potential. An ever-extending cosmos as a background for thinking about presence and absence.”

The artist spends a lot of time thinking about how humans shape the environment and how the environment shapes us, too.

For Gormley, art isn’t confined to reflecting on the past. It’s also an invitation to consider the future — one we have a part in shaping.

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