Secret 7”, the charitable initiative which invites creatives both established and up-and-coming to submit artwork for the sleeves of 700 vinyl records, is back for its ninth edition. The event is presented by War Child, the charity that will be the recipient of the proceeds, which provides protection, education and mental health support to children in conflict zones.

The initiative selects seven tracks from global musicians, pressing each onto 100 limited-edition 7” vinyl records. Secret 7” then asks creatives to design a one-of-a-kind sleeve for each record, interpreting the track in any style or medium they want. This year, the event partnered with Design and Art Direction’s New Blood initiative, which hosted an open call for emerging talent to take part.

The headline artists for 2025 have now been revealed, and it’s a star-studded agenda, with sleeves designed by, among many others, Turner Prize-winning sculptor Antony Gormley OBE RA; fashion designer Sir Paul Smith; The Cure frontman Robert Smith; artist and designer Yinka Ilori MBE; multimedia artist Haroon Mirza; multidisciplinary artist Ken Nwadiogbu; sound-inspired painter Andrew Pierre Hart; contemporary painter Yooyun Yang; and Radiohead’s longtime collaborator and visual artist Stanley Donwood. Yinka Ilori will also create etched designs on all 700 records, wrapping them in bright colours.

The result is 700 distinct records that blur the boundaries between music and collectible art. These will be showcased at Greenwich Peninsula’s NOW Gallery from 11 April until 1 June 2025, and will be available for auction throughout. The designers’ identities are kept secret until all the items are sold, meaning that buyers won’t know who designed their sleeve, or which track is inside it, until after purchase – hence the name Secret 7”.

The seven tracks featured on the records are Warsong by The Cure, Be More Kind by Frank Turner, Merchant of Paradise by Gregory Porter, Beautiful People by Jessie Ware, Black Rain by Keane, Return to Oz by Scissor Sisters, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s new song, which is exclusive to Secret 7", Devotion.

During its nine-year run, Secret 7” has produced and sold 5,600 one-of-a-kind records, raising over £700,000 for charity, and has attracted contributions from artists and designers including Sir Anish Kapoor, Yoko Ono, Sir Peter Blake, David Shrigley and Ai Weiwei. The initiative has also pushed boundaries of what a record artwork can be, with past sleeves having been made from concrete, felt, lego, acrylic, clay and stitchwork.

secret-7.co.uk

From Laura Marling to Antony Gormley, Mickalene Thomas and St. Vincent – this year we have criss-crossed the worlds of art and culture to speak to the best in the business. Here are extracts from some of our favourite conversations. Click through to read the full interviews.

Top ten art and culture interviews of the year

Antony Gormley

People, for whatever reason, do associate me with the body – I think that's fair enough,’ says Antony Gormley when we catch up over Zoom, as he prepares to open his New York art exhibition ‘Aerial’ at the city’s White Cube. ‘But I am, and always have been, as interested in the body of the viewer as I am in mine, as an example of a human body in space.’

It is a preoccupation he is building on in ‘Aerial’ through sculpture, which references his earlier considerations of proprioceptive environments we have seen in the cave-like Room, the immersive Blind Light and in the Breathing Room drawings. ‘They are all attempts to somehow catalyse space itself and make environments in which the viewer’s body is invited to sense its own movement through time and space,’ Gormley adds. ‘And you could say that there are a number of works that do both. Take Model, Space Station, Cave – all of those are, as it were, buildings, but made with reference to the form of the body that you can actually enter and move through. And I'm continuing that line of thought.’

Read the full Antony Gormley interview

St. Vincent

Since the release of her 2007 debut album, Marry Me, the Texan-born, guitar-shredding St. Vincent has continued to reinvent herself, dabbling in synth-pop, hard rock and everything in between. Like Bowie before her, she’s played with, and prodded at, the idea of persona. For the release of 2017’s Masseduction – a time she calls her ‘dominatrix at the mental institution’ era – she dressed only in latex, insisting journalists interview her (decidedly prickly) alter-ego inside a neon pink box. During 2021’s Daddy’s Home, she was a louche, 1970s gangster, in a flared two-piece and blonde bob wig. And for mockumentary The Nowhere Inn, directed by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, she portrayed a heightened (and hideous) self-obsessed version of herself. ‘It wasn’t great for my career,’ she notes, dryly.

Read the full St. Vincent interview

Mickalene Thomas

American artist Mickalene Thomas sensually subverts Black female representation throughout history in works that draw on an eclectic roster of references. Now, her major new touring exhibition, ‘Mickalene Thomas: All About Love’ (currently at The Broad in LA and travelling on to Philadelphia and London later in 2025), featuring more than 80 works created over the last 20 years, nods to Thomas’ desire to imbue the sensual and sensitive figures she portrays with a joyful positivity, with a title referencing feminist author bell hooks’ canonic text of the same title.

‘I am constantly drawing inspiration from representations of intergenerational female empowerment, autobiography, memory and the tenets of Black feminist theoretical writings,’ says Thomas. ‘Authors and academics such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins have always provided supportive context for my work, in particular, and of course, bell hooks.’ These broad references are reflected in the multidisciplinary nature of the works themselves, which utilise a mix of materials in her distinctive collage style. ‘Collage is such an intricate means of discovery and exploration of all my ideas,’ she says. ‘It’s a way to learn and unlearn within my own process, and a way to anchor and make sense of my compositions. I enjoy rebuilding and the essential peeling back of layers to get to the core of my ideas. Collage does this for me.’

Read the full Mickalene Thomas interview

Laura Marling

In autumn 2016, Laura Marling was playing a run of shows in the American Northwest and West. Starting in Washington state, the English singer-songwriter moved on to Oregon and then down to California. ‘Me and my friend, who was on tour with me, were going down the coast,’ Marling recalls of a journey that took them from Mill Valley, to Santa Cruz, to Santa Barbara. ‘And we were losing so much money on the tour that we were staying in campsites. It's not a boo-hoo story, it was fun to do,’ she clarifies with a smile. ‘It was nice weather. But we were in tents – well, a single tent.

‘We didn't have much cash, but we bought some lino and some really nice card and we started designing sigils [tarot-inspired prints]. We would make 15 of them and sell them at the shows, and then that would be enough money for the campsite and the petrol for the car.’ The sigils were made as linocuts – ‘so they're easily repeatable’ – and were postcard-sized, signed and dated. Marling charged $10 for each.

Read the full Laura Marling interview

Olivia Erlanger

‘Both in school and at home, I was indoctrinated with an ideal of American exceptionalism where progress is linear, and each succeeding generation will be more prosperous than the last,’ says New York-based artist Olivia Erlanger, who is featured in 2024’s Wallpaper* USA 400. ‘This didn’t match with reality. I came of age during the introduction of the personal computer, 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the advent and parasitic spread of reality TV, the global financial crisis of 2008 – events that have promoted the spiralling and fracturing of that promised progress. But dreams are boring. Delusions are more interesting and more powerful as make-believe frequently turns into reality.’

Read the full Olivia Erlanger interview

Kenia Almaraz Murillo

Bolivian-born textile artist Kenia Almaraz Murillo is rethinking weaving’s traditional reputation with work that zigzags across mediums and references. In her new London art exhibition, Murillo adorns her wall hangings with found, urban objects, from car headlights to motorbike headlamps, brilliantly lit up with curves of neon.

‘In my work, each piece bears witness to a specific encounter, whether it be with an animal, a landscape, a star, a myth, a legend, a story,’ says Murillo. ‘My approach is one of paying homage. I have a great admiration for living animals, and the animals of myths and legends. I try to make them come alive through my threads and to almost relive those precise moments when the discovery took place.

Read the full Kenia Almaraz Murillo interview

Rachel Feinstein

‘It’s very emotional for me to have a show in Miami,’ says Rachel Feinstein, speaking on the eve of her major new exhibition at The Bass Museum of Art. Spanning almost three decades of work by the Miami-raised, New York-based artist, the retrospective – the first in her hometown – celebrates and questions society’s embrace of artifice, particularly prescient when considering Miami’s reputation for decadence. ‘It’s got these crazy extremes, between good and evil, dark and light, male and female, and it’s all been very unconsciously important to me,’ she says. ‘And then, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve done a lot of work on dream therapy and it’s become more important. So Miami is the key to all of that, the basis of everything I do.’

Read the full Rachel Feinstein interview

Wayne McGregor and Max Richter

Sir Wayne McGregor is the master of creative collaborations. As resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet in London, a position he has held since 2006, he has translated an eclectic roster of literary, avant-garde and contemporary references into works for the stage (along with costumes in collaboration with Grace Wales Bonner and with Burberry), as well as taken the helm on film, TV, fashion and music videos projects, and founded his own London-based studio.

His latest project is an adaptation of Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of novels, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam, into a three-act ballet. The project marks 16 years of his partnership with composer Max Richter, whose haunting, post-classical music is the soundtrack to Atwood’s post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Read the full Wayne McGregor and Max Richter interview

Elmgreen & Dragset

As Elmgreen & Dragset, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset bring a smart subversion to their large-scale installations. Over the last three decades, they have taken a sideways look at social and political systems by recontextualising mainstream motifs: works have included a full-scale replica of a Prada boutique in the Texan desert and a vast, vertical swimming pool, now installed in Hong Kong.

This playful mindset underpins a major new show at Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which, for the first time in its 38-year history, is staging a contemporary exhibition in its central sculpture nave. ‘L’Addition’ (until 2 February 2025) considers the effects of recontextualisation alongside a figurative rethinking of classical motifs, with Elmgreen & Dragset’s works taking their cue from the 19th-century sculptures in the museum’s permanent collection. Here, though, they strike an uncanny tone. Look again at the apparently traditionally styled and crafted works and you begin to spot subversive details: a classical figure appears to be wearing headphones, another a VR headset, and could that one be playing with a drone?

Read the full Elmgreen & Dragset interview

John Akomfrah

John Akomfrah’s immersive and visual works consider migration and diasporic communities through the media of film. In new work for the Venice Biennale this year, commissioned and managed by the British Council, Akomfrah dissects a historical narrative through an auditory lens, putting sound at the centre of his new piece, Listening All Night To The Rain.

‘I’d got to a point where I thought a lot of what I want to say involves trying to pull people into positions of listening,’ he says. ‘It’s about acknowledging connections with other species, and each other. We’re cautioned to listen to rising water levels, CO2 emissions – there are a lot of voices begging to be listened to. It felt like a good moment to just bring up some of the past. [The work] is both looking ahead to the things that we are definitely interested in the present, but a lot of it is also to do with the immediate past and the things we haven’t really paid attention to, [and] sometimes they are related. There’s much to hear.’

Read the full John Akomfrah interview

‘People, for whatever reason, do associate me with the body - I think that's fair enough,’ says Antony Gormley when we catch up over Zoom, as he prepares to open his New York art exhibition ‘Aerial’ at the city’s White Cube. ‘But I am, and always have been, as interested in the body of the viewer as I am in mine, as an example of a human body in space.’

It is a preoccupation he is building on in ‘Aerial’ through sculpture, which references his earlier considerations of proprioceptive environments we have seen in the cave-like Room, the immersive Blind Light and in the Breathing Room drawings. ‘They are all attempts to somehow catalyse space itself and make environments in which the viewer’s body is invited to sense its own movement through time and space,’ Gormley adds. ‘And you could say that there are a number of works that do both. Take Model, Space Station, Cave – all of those are, as it were, buildings, but made with reference to the form of the body that you can actually enter and move through. And I'm continuing that line of thought.’

In Aerial the work – from which the White Cube show takes its title – solid aluminium bars create a lattice of dispersed energy into which the viewer is invited. The material’s lightweight qualities, making it a natural choice structurally, appealed to Gormley, as did its relationship to light. ‘These spines, elements, roots, branches – whatever we want to call them – are reaching out into space and trying to work in a way as a transmitter or a sensor. It's almost like a dowsing rod: as you walk, if there was a big truck coming down Madison Avenue, the whole thing would start to vibrate.’

Fittingly, New York, the antithesis of the open landscape Gormley has frequently interacted with in the past, is a key inspiration behind this work. He expresses his wonder at the high rise, high density of the city, of the sheer scale of human habitation in a small surface area. ‘I've always loved New York, because it seems to me the longest social experiment: can we live in ways that allow the maximum amount of human interaction, but at the same time acknowledge the nonhuman world and the elemental world.

‘New York remains, for me, this extraordinary place which has a very clear grid system, but it acknowledges early First Nation pathways that run through it and contradict the absolute grid system, down the cross streets and along the avenues. You feel the wind, you smell the sea view. The light in New York is extraordinary. There's a crispness and clarity. So in spite of it being an entirely human made environment, you're also aware of the elemental world.’

It recalls the restrained wildness of Piet Mondrian’s Pier and Ocean series. ‘This is really exciting,’ Gormley adds. ‘It is the biggest single challenge that our species faces. How are we going to reconcile our extended technology and our internal needs, with the rights and needs of the biosphere? Mondrian had to come to New York, it's the perfect place for doing what Mondrian began in, in the Pier and Ocean series, which was how do we apply a rational system of the understanding of basic structures to the natural world.’ The vastness and the density of New York provides a timely context. ‘I started in New York in 1984. This has always been, in a way, the testing ground for my proposals, and I think of every exhibition in a way as a proposition.’

Upstairs at White Cube New York, three cast iron Big Double Blockworks (all 2023) emotionally consider our essential need for human relationships. Made up of connecting stacks of blocks, in order to stay vertical, they are by necessity mutually interdependent, expressing both a vulnerability and a stability. ‘They are an expression of a feeling that I had: maybe this is something that everybody has experienced irrespective of Covid. That dwelling together and an acceptance of the intimacy of shared daily life. It was about recognising that another life became an extension of your consciousness. Sex is a very small part of it. What it is to do with is the idea that through intimate proximity, we extend our thought.’

Big Tender comprises stacked body forms, while the upright bodies of Big Sidle and Big Bare express both a stability and precarity. ‘I would like to think my work invites empathy. It was through lockdown that I thought, I don't need to go through a meditation on the evolution of the works themselves. Why can't I just – and this is what we did – take two pre existing Blockworks and see how they might osmose or connect. And that was an incredible breakthrough. Now, I look back at the whole development of Blockworks over 12 years, and started kind of crashing them together. It was a total revelation. The two vertical [works] are the result of bringing together two previously made Blockworks and seeing how in order to stay standing, they had to share masses. The tectonics, or the sort of Jenga kind of discipline of that, became then the carrier of emotion. Where that load path passes, how one work depends upon the other and then becomes one thing in discovering a stable centre of gravity. And it was really, really, really exciting. It's new for me. And it's really exciting to show them here.’

By celebrating the feeling we all share when considering the instability of our world and climate, Gormley invites serious contemplation of our very human vulnerability. ‘I don't want sentimental pictures of people canoodling or whatever. But here is an invitation to think about this. I don't know what art is. I don't know what it can become. But it's an evolving story, as is the story of our species. And I do fundamentally believe that this is part of our toolbox for survival. We've had to make these things in order to understand ourselves.’

Antony Gormley 'AERIAL', is at White Cube New York until 15 June 2024

whitecube.com

‘Are you from Wallpaper*?‘ cries a voice in motion, originating from a helmeted, high-vis-clad cyclist hurling down an industrial street in Islington on an early October morning. The voice belongs to a very lively Antony Gormley, one of the most recognisable, accoladed artists of a century. 

Gormley leads me, and the bicycle, through the studio gate, best described as a barricade, into the expansive forecourt of his purpose-built creation palace, designed by David Chipperfield in 2003. It’s formed of seven white pitched roofs, hugged on each side by galvanised steel staircases. It’s the sort of industrial-scale studio that caters for stratospheric-level thoughts, of which Gormley has many. 

Inside the double-height space are Gormley’s bodies, standing upright and protruding horizontally from walls, ghostly, fractured suggestions of figures, in lines, pixels, and knots and a sea of maquettes, including one for Alert, a recent (and somewhat divisive) sculpture for Imperial College London. 

I’m interviewing Gormley ahead of his show ‘Body Field’ at Xavier Hufkens’ new St-Georges space in Brussels. The gallery, a modernist monolith designed by Robbrecht & Daem architects, opened earlier this year. Gormley is impressed: ‘To see the equivalent of the Met Breuer suddenly inserted into this comfortable but quite self-satisfied range of 19th-century row-house designs is just so exciting.’

Gormley has been collaborating with Hufkens for 35 years and ‘Body Field’ marks his ninth show with the gallery. ‘I think we’re friends united in a common wish for art to be a present but lasting force in changing the world,’ he says of his gallerist. 

‘Body Field’, spanning four floors of the gallery, is organised into three zones: the mapping of urban context, the mapping of the interior network of bodily emotion, and the fusion of self and other. And there’s a lot to digest. 

The show places humanity in a ‘grid’ of rapid urbanisation, the equally as gridlike world of cyber communication, our ‘dangerous’ separation from the elemental, our ‘collective condition of narcissistic self-observation’, and poses a key question: ‘What is a human being now?’

‘We’ve never had tools of self-knowing at our disposal so immediately before, or tools of self-destruction so easily available. And we’re at more than a tipping point. We’re in a moment of utter crisis.’ 

The show begins with Run III, a sculpture Gormley describes as an ‘attempt at making a 3D drawing that describes the architecture that’s already there’. It comprises a 153m-long steel tube that ebbs and flows to depict the domestic heights of chairs, tables and windowsills, emphasising the infrastructure that would ordinarily live on the periphery of muscle memory. This is not simply sculptural, Gormley notes, but performative. ‘There is a sense that it’s articulating your movements through space. The body of the viewer is forced into a kind of choreography.’

Corner offers a change in tempo, and is the first of two concrete works that bookend the show. This ‘bunker for one’ features a gaping orifice leading to a void that would accommodate a body. Is this a womb or tomb? Or perhaps it’s a meditation on a bound body with a free mind, or even a reflection on an urbanised world rich in manmade infrastructure yet devoid of humanity. As expected, the answer is more loaded. ‘Vernadsky’s promise of the noosphere has been materialised in the world wide web,’ he says. ‘Our ability to know about things that we will never physically experience has never been equalled and is now universal. The zone of that freedom is all internal… all we need to do is close our eyes and we are in a space with no dimensions, that has no objects, and is totally extensive.’ 

When thinking about Antony Gormley’s best-known works – The Angel of the North, Event Horizon or Another Place – the overbearing sentiment is that of bodily solitude in environmental expanses. In a curious departure, ‘Body Field’ debuts Gormley’s Double Blockworks, the artist’s ‘repeated investigation into the relationship between mitosis and sexual congress or the confusion of the two’.

One could offer infinite interpretations for these intriguing duets: division of the self (the casts were based on scans of Gormley’s body clasping an existing singular blockwork); the increasingly polarised self, or extreme notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in global identity politics. Or maybe it’s more obvious and even less tangible: a story of love. ‘The idea of two bodies that are in a way unique, but similar, have a balanced relationship with each other, are proximate and therefore sharing the same air,’ says Gormley, who developed the idea during Covid-19 isolation. ‘The most successful work is where two bodies have found a way of occupying space together where you can’t quite tell which block belongs to which.’

Importantly, for these works, Gormley drew on Michelangelo’s ultimate unfinished masterpiece – the Rondanini Pietà (1552-64), which depicts the Virgin Mary cradling the flaccid body of the dead Christ. For Gormley, it is also a ‘picture of the artist in relation to the work’, of a living artist breathing life into inanimate material; striving, in an obsessive process of revision, perhaps in vain, to give thought and feeling to raw material. ‘I just find it unbelievably inspiring and powerful,’ says Gormley. ‘Why do [we] continually try to use our energy to transform the residue of geological time into something that approximates or pictures life? Well, we do it because we know we’re going to die.’ 

Gormley has been known to experiment beyond the bounds of physical matter. In a 2017 project with Acute Art and astrophysicist Priya Natarajan, titled Lunatick, he turned the human body into an intergalactic spaceship, through VR. Although he describes the experiment as fun, he concluded that ‘virtual reality is better dealing with space than it is dealing with objects’.

‘Sculpture becomes so important in a time where we are asked to leave our bodies behind, either through screens, VR headsets or the Metaverse,’ he says. ‘While the virtual gives us extraordinary godlike powers, to fly to the moon, the necessary correlative balancing of that is art in all its forms of first-hand experience: seeing paint on canvas or a lump of displaced material that then you’re invited to reconsider because it’s found a new situation in the world. What sculpture offers is the reinforcing of the palpable [and the] experience of touchable, feelable things in a space that you share, something that you can walk through, walk around and be with in time.’

In ‘Body Field’, an entire floor is dedicated to nine of Gormley’s Knotwork sculptures, which use interweaving linear formations that cluster to emphasise areas of compression, emotion or pain. As Gormley describes, they are ‘an attempt to articulate the pathology of a body. Not in terms of the mechanics, but in terms of its emotional zone of tension and fluidity.’

On the top floor are four cosmic drawings. ‘I realised that the drawings were utterly essential to the way that I work. They’re a kind of seedbed of everything. I draw every day. I realised that I hadn’t acknowledged their importance adequately. They act as a catalyst for people to be constantly aware of the bigger picture, the truth of an expanding universe… all the determinants that we take for granted are not there by chance; [that] the air we breathe [and] the atmosphere we depend on is the result of the activity, bacteria or archaea that started 3.7 billion years ago.’ 

‘You might say, “What the fuck has this got to do with a sculpture exhibition?” Well, I think it has a lot. If sculpture is about trying to make sense of the material phenomena that surround us, [then] these immersions or connectivities are really important,’ he says. ‘All the works in the show are diagnostic instruments through which we can perhaps begin to understand our own condition.’

If, as Gormley claims, the body is a place as opposed to an object, then his work is perhaps well placed to house it all: the burden of occupying a human body, and the freedom of the conscious mind, our strained, unsustainable dependence on the earth’s resources, and our delusions about liberated individualism. 

I leave Gormley’s studio with a mind blown and a brain in knots. He is an artist of microscopic analyses and maximalist aspirations. His verbal justifications, like his work, are not just conceived, but immaculately sculpted before being let out into the world. A package of sculptural prowess, conceptual ingenuity and hyper-contextualisation is what sets Gormley apart; in which making is afforded equal importance as giving voice to what’s made.

Antony Gormley: ‘Body Field’, until 17 December 2022 at Xavier Hufkens, St-Georges, Brussels. antonygormley.com; xavierhufkens.com

Antony Gormley’s blink-and-you’ll miss it Iron Baby (1999) greets the hoards of culture vultures already circling London’s Royal Academy of Arts, ahead of his anticipated self-titled exhibition. Its foetal form, cowering on the Annenberg Courtyard floor, snatches your breath as you enter the RA. ‘I just want to go and cover him up with a blanket,’ says someone. ‘It's going to be a trip hazard,’ jokes another. And so the tone is set for Gormley’s 17-room exhibition, that will literally and figuratively have you on the wrong foot.

Try to find a quiet time to experience it if you can. It’s how the artist – a student of Buddhist meditation – would no doubt want you to experience it. But, despite the crowds, a calming aura settles on each installation. It’s in part down to the Enlightenment-era galleries themselves, which are equal parts imposing and meditative. Gormley was intimately involved in all aspects of the three-year long curation process (as is common with solo exhibitions at the artist-run institution) and he puts the existing architecture to great use.

Indeed, work has been undertaken to reinforce the historic galleries’ floors and walls in anticipation of Gormley’s large-scale sculptures and installations. The Main Galleries have become an armature for sculptural experiment. The veining on the ornate marble-arched doors echoes the rust marks on Gormley’s statues in Lost Horizon I, that sprout from the walls, floor and ceiling, forming a metal forest of faceless men. Elsewhere, in the RA's grandest gallery, miles upon miles of meshwork in Matrix III (2019) builds ever denser, like a cloud formation before a storm, underneath a vast glass skylight.

Few new works are present in the exhibition, but all feel fresh in their site-specificity, even for those who are familiar with them. Each is mesmeric in its intense physicality, playing with spatial awareness and perception – a testament to Gormley’s curatorial sensitivity. He has compared the challenges of any particular site to the resistance of marble for the sculptor who carves. No piece exhibits this more than the penultimate one, a giant steel tomb that you can physically enter, seeking pockets of light that reveal themselves as you crawl. Groping your way through the womb-like dark, you come out the other side, and – passing a room flooded with seawater – eventually, into the blinking light of the courtyard. Here, you’re reunited with the Iron Baby you saw on the way in, and brim with a new kind of kinship with it.

It’s easy to be bedazzled, and somewhat distracted, by the large format sculpture on display, but the drawings and small paintings are not to be skimmed over. Handpicked by the artist, they present some of his quieter moments, directly from his 45-year archive. They dart between philosophical musings on quantum mechanics that resemble an architect’s blueprints. Like pages ripped from a diary, they offer intimate insight into Gormley’s thinking – on urbanism, on the body, on our relationship with nature.

With such edifying themes being covered, Gormley was keen to keep a close eye on the commercial arm of the exhibition. And although you exit through the gift shop, a reading room has been planted in-between, with the intention of offering visitors pause for thought after what is a dizzying display. Gormley has edited the shop's product collection, including a stationary collaboration with Muji (Gormley uses its notebooks daily), a cycling jacket with London brand Rapha (the artist is a keen cyclist), and a limited-edition fragrance by famed nose Azzi Glasser.

INFORMATION
‘Antony Gormley’, 21 September – 3 December, Royal Academy of Arts. royalacademy.org.uk

ADDRESS

Royal Academy of Arts
Burlington House
London W1J 0BD

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Masters of their respective disciplines, Marina Abramović, Iris van Herpen, and Marco Brambilla are not the first names you would associate with opera. In fact, none of them have ever worked on one before – until now. Each have thrown their creative might behind a new production of Debussy’s famously dark and disturbing masterwork Pelleas et Melisande, set to debut in Antwerp next week. Abramović took on set design, van Herpen costumes, and Brambilla an abstract video backdrop.

Despite their lack of operatic experience (not to mention the fact that they live on different continents) the trio got on famously. ‘Everything has gone a lot smoother than one would think,’ says Brambilla, who is best known for directing Kanye West’s critically acclaimed Power video (2017). He had wanted to work with Van Herpen and Abramović for ‘ages’, and when this opportunity presented itself, he ‘couldn’t resist the massive potential for cross-pollination of interdisciplinary ideas’.

Talks began a year ago in New York, when the great and the good were gathered in the city for Frieze. Led by co-directors Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet (of Antony Gormley’s production Babel(words), 2010), the creative team met to discuss a ‘contemporary retelling’ of Debussy’s seminal work, to premier in the 100th year since his death.

The production, billed as ‘a new concept of abstract staging for an opera’, will see film, costumery and set design perform in chorus, in front of a vast, concave mirror, which merges seamlessly into an inclined floor – the brainchild of Abramović. ‘The audience will be under the impression that they are inside a great, silvery eye ball,’ says Brambilla. The ‘iris’, so to speak – a seven-metre screen suspended in the centre of the ‘retina’ mirror – will play Brambilla’s cosmic video compositions.

‘It will begin in eclipse,’ he explains. ‘There will be a sunrise behind a planet, and as the storyline unfolds, nebulas and galaxies will dance.’ The footage – manipulated from real NASA photography taken by the Hubble Telescope – is mesmeric, terrifying, and artful. It seems it can’t have been plucked from our skies.

Grand celestial visions are the ideal match for Pelleas et Melisande, with its dream-like atmosphere and Symbolist libretto adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck’s play of the same name. Among imagery of forests, castles, and oceans, a deathly love triangle plays out, as the skies explode intimidatingly in the background. 

Such themes resonate with Brambilla, who has a penchant for big ideas, allegory and gradiose classical imagery. ‘Both the libretto and the music have always screamed of the cosmos to me. There’s so many references to looking, eyesite, and vision’, he says. ‘It compelled me to look up.’

Others have had similar compulsions, and it isn’t the first time the opera has been abstractly produced. So innovative and ambitious were the original stage notes, Debussy spent years trying to find a suitable venue, until it eventually premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1902. Jean Cocteau designed a graphic set in the 1960s, and in 1997, almost a century after its first iteration, Robert Wilson directed a wildly successful production for the Paris National Opera. Brambilla and the team could only start with an entirely blank slate, rather than drawing upon the progression of previous adaptations. ‘Where Wilson’s production was paired back and minimalist, we have created a warmer, more rounded world,’ he says. ‘There’s a primal energy to this production; it verges on science fiction – it takes the audience into another dimension, abstractly, dreamily.’

If anyone is under the disillusion that operas are stuffy, academic things, a pastime of the older middle classes, this production will turn you around. It’s a visually electric masterwork, for and of the 21st century; the product of a brave pas de trois between some of opera’s newest visionary minds.

INFORMATION

Pelleas et Melisande will premier at Opera Vlaanderen, Antwerp on 2 February and run until 16 June. It will tour to Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Geneva and Venice in 2019. For more information, visit the Opera Vlaanderen website

ADDRESS

Opera Vlaanderen
Frankrijklei 1
2000 Antwerp

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To many born and in bred in Folkestone, their hometown is becoming more and more like a little London by the sea – for better or worse. As city folk descend, house prices rise, and empty second homes stand skeletal along the shore.

With all the significant tensions that come with the Kentish gentrification, so too arrives relief, in the form of culture, learning programmes, and infrastructural development. The double-edged knife of international attention arrives too. To wit, the ever-narrowing eyes of the art world are currently trained on the fourth edition of the Folkestone Triennial.

Comprising an eight week-long showcase of 20 pieces of newly commissioned public art, ranging from the sculptural to the conceptual, the Triennial brings considerable investment and art tourism ­– not to mention a bubbling mix of local excitement and raised eyebrows – to this newly desirable seaside idle.

Curator Lewis Biggs, who has been at the artistic helm of the Triennial since its last iteration in 2014, says local reaction and engagement is getting better all the time. ‘Now, when people see strange objects appearing in their landscape, they know it’s Triennial time,’ he explains. ‘Then the stories start to unfold – you hear it in the streets. The significance of the town’s artwork begins to be manufactured without us having to do anything. It’s lovely to see that.’

Standing like a call to duty, and overseeing the rest of the town atop the highest cliff face, Bob and Roberta Smith’s monumental sign declares ‘FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL’, wrapped around an old coastal fort, and looking out to sea, like a Brexit apology to mainland Europe. It’s a mantra bannered on smaller signs throughout town, and it acts as an unofficial, but apt, tagline for the long list of art-education activities happening in town.

Northwards, barely-there coastal trails slip up cliff edges, revealing Marc Schmitz and Dolgor Ser-Od’s giant yellow megaphone, that gathers the noise of the waves like a seashell. Further up, Hartley’s statuesque white structure, filled with Iron Age millstones dug from the next door archeological site, stands mast-like against the coastal vista. Overhanging the cliff, the stones look like they could tumble into the channel at any moment, and wash up in France. The work speaks to the (loosely employed) theme of this year’s triennial: ‘Double Edge’.

It’s a theme that nods to the fact that we are in an ‘edgy’ moment. ‘Folkestone has always been, a frontier, a border,’ Biggs explains. ‘It’s the perfect place to highlight the relationship we have with other countries – and the fact that no one country is an island.’

Some artists have adhered more closely than others. ‘Theme? What theme?’ jokes Michael Craig-Martin. ‘As soon as an artwork adheres to a theme, it loses its power.’ His colourful lightbulb mural wraps around a curving façade at the foot of The Old High Street – a glowing, optimistic gateway to the town’s Creative Quarter. Wholly supportive of reaction’s like this, Biggs was keen for the Triennial’s title to act more as a talking point, rather than a strictly followed doctrine. ‘Artists tend to perform the best when they’re given their freedom,’ he says.

As Biggs hoped, each artist has interpreted the theme with creative abandon. Richard Woods sees it as a jumping off point. ‘My work was motivated by a trip to Folkestone, but I think the issues it throws up are much broader than this single location,’ he explains. The British artist has created six colourful, cartoonish ‘Holiday Homes’ dotted in incongruous locations around town – from the beach to a mini-roundabout. The idea sprouted when a local estate agent offered Woods a leaflet selling ‘second homes by the sea’. ‘It made me think about the lack of housing stock,’ Woods says. ‘What happens to the people who sell their homes “for cash”? Where do they go? What about the people who don’t have anywhere to live in the first place?’

Probing questions like this can be read in each of the works on show. From Antony Gormley’s statue, which looks out to sea from a disused ship’s loading bay like a lost sailor; to Sol Calero’s vibrant beachfront ‘social space’, built to encourage cross-cultural experiences.

The closer you get to the works, the more cracks you see around them. The fort under Bob and Roberta Smith’s banner is crumbling. The Islamic centre under Wong Hoy Cheong’s glowing minaret installation is a tired-looking, ex-industrial building. Instead of detracting from the glamour or gravitas of the works, they add poignancy. The story of this town is still being written, and it’s future far from secure. Every three years, Folkestone is filled with more and more acts of art, steering it onwards.

INFORMATION

The Folkestone Triennial continues until 5 November. For more information, visit the website

ADDRESS

Various locations
Folkestone
Kent CT20

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New York's Sean Kelly gallery has dedicated its latest show to both new and early works by British artist Antony Gormley. Known and lauded for his sculptures (particularly Angel of the North, the imposing public colossus commissioned in 1994), installations and public art works exploring the human body’s relationship to space, this is Gormley’s fifth exhibition with the gallery.

Entitled ‘Construct’, the show opens with a life-size work from the series of ‘bodycases’ (dating back to 1985) called Bridge. This is one of Gormley’s earliest works, made from a plaster mold of the artist’s body, strengthened with fibreglass and encased in a skin of lead. There is also a more recent piece, from 2015, called Scaffold, in which Gormley has translated the grid of horizontal and vertical lines of Bridge into a freestanding, three-dimensional map of the internal volumes of the body. This, and so many of the artist’s works, remind the viewer to consider the body ‘less as an object and more as a site and agent of transformation’.

‘Antony Gormley’s exhibition "Construct" is particularly significant because it includes key early works, which haven’t previously been exhibited in the US, alongside Antony’s newest, most monumental series yet,’ says gallery owner Sean Kelly. ‘The exhibition draws a visual and conceptual thread from the beginnings of the artist’s practice to the present time.’

INFORMATION

’Construct’ is on view until 18 June. For more details, visit the Sean Kelly gallery website

ADDRESS

Sean Kelly New York
475 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10018

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'I started collecting about seven years ago, firstly with photography, and that's where my connection with Sotheby's began,’ says Erdem Moralioglu, just days after his celebrated A/W 2016 London Fashion Week show. He's surrounded by art works that will feature in the auction house’s first ‘Contemporary Curated’ London sale, guest edited by Moralioglu and taking place on 15 March.

Looking at a cluster of paintings that includes works by Georg Baselitz, Lucian Freud, Louise Bourgeois and Marlene Dumas, Moralioglu explains his selection criteria: ‘You can see the touch of the human hand across them all,’ he says, before acknowledging George Condo’s Untitled miniature, 2000, as his favourite lot.

‘It’s a fascinating process working with an auction house through all aspects of the sale, from cataloging to getting to grips with the body of work,’ Moralioglu continues, having also celebrated his brand’s 10th anniversary at the art specialist’s London S2 gallery last December. ‘It’s been an amazing learning curve, which I was really happy to be a part of.’

Renowned for his modern use of innovative textiles and original prints, the first work the Royal College of Art alumnus bought himself was a photograph by German Wolfgang Tillmans, and he has since moved onto illustration and painting for his personal collection. Opening his first retail space on London’s South Audley Street last year provided further impetus to invest. Moralioglu currently has a David Hockney photo collage and drawings by Andy Warhol and Jean Cocteau in store, while his latest purchases include works by Candida Höfer and Rineke Dijkstra.

But back to Sotheby's' lot: the expansive auction comprises 205 works with an average price point of £11,000, and spans American figurative painting, abstraction, sculpture and photography, with highlights including Josef Albers’ Study for Hommage to the Square: Framed Sky ‘C', 1970, and Yayoi Kusama’s Fear of Death, 2008.

‘The selection is an extraordinary mix,’ says Joanna Steingold, Sotheby's deputy director and head of 'Contemporary Curated'. ‘It’s not just works of £100,000 plus, it is starting from £500 through to a top lot by Antony Gormley at an estimated £200,000,' she explains. ‘We really want to invite the new curious collectors with this sale, and encourage people who might not have thought that they were able to buy from Sotheby’s before.’

The 'Contemporary Curated' series was first launched in the United States in 2013, and has since featured auctions guest curated by American author and avid collector James Frey, Tamara Mellon, Anna Sui and NFL player Keith Rivers. The next London satellite will take place in September this year.

’It’s a fascinating process working with an auction house through all aspects of the sale, from cataloging to getting to grips with the body of work,’ explains Moralioglu, pictured in his London store with some of his curated works. ‘It’s been an amazing learning curve, which I was really happy to be a part of’

INFORMATION                                                                                                                        

The 'Contemporary Curated' London auction takes place on 15 March at 10:30am. The pre-sale exhibition, also guest curated by Moralioglu, will be open to the public 12–14 March at Sotheby’s London. For more information, visit the Sotheby's website

ADDRESS

Sotheby’s
34–35 New Bond Street
London, W1A 2AA

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Would you pass up the opportunity to own a mini masterpiece by a contemporary creative genius? Nor would we. Such is the proposition of the latest exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum.

‘Inspired by Soane: I Found This and Thought of You’ will gather and exhibit postcard-sized artworks from some of the most famous names around; from Zaha Hadid to Ross Lovegrove, Paul Smith, Antony Gormley, Manolo Blanik, Christopher Bailey, and even broadcaster Jon Snow. Most notable perhaps though, is the work of the late American architect Michael Graves, who completed his drawing before his death earlier this year.

The famous artists, architects, designers and cartoonists were all inspired by 100 objects from the museum’s collection - including some pieces that aren’t normally on public display - as well as the iconic building itself. The resulting miniature works of art are now on display at what is widely considered one of London’s best-known secret treasures, and will be raffled off on 26 June.

To enter the raffle, museum-goers can pledge a donation (£350 minimum) for specific works. Each donation (up to the value of £50,000) will be matched by the Leon Levy Foundation. Funds raised will go towards making the museum’s extensive drawing collection more widely accessible to the public by making them digitally available.

The exhibition and raffle coincide with the opening of the private apartments of the museum, following a £7m investment and big conservation and restoration project by London architect Caruso St John and Julian Harrap. 

ADDRESS

Sir John Soane’s Museum
13 Lincoln's Inn Fields,
London
WC2A 3BP

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The visual impact of Antony Gormley’s major new show, 'Second Body', is immediate; from his precise and densely packed arrangement of 60 orthogonal forms to his impenetrable, dimensional grid of steel.

But the British artist suggests that, in occupying all four halls of Thaddaeus Ropac’s gallery in Pantin, he is presenting four discrete assertions of art as 'space activators' — and that the combined effect is far more immersive. 'The distinction between endless space and absolute place; I think this is within all of us,' he told Wallpaper* during a preview. 'It’s that containment of being in the body but being able to see beyond it into infinity.'

Upon entry, visitors are confronted by a massive, peaked sculpture that stands four metres tall, its silhouette conflating house and body. To the immediate left is Expansion Field with its five-dozen Corten steel figures, ranging in mass from 150 kg to a half-tonne; they made their debut in a slightly different arrangement last fall at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, yet Gormley says he had the dimensions of Ropac’s gallery in mind when they were first conceived. 'I’m using a third of the space here,' he explained, noting that the relationship of scale is as 'tight as it can be.'

Beyond Expansion Field, a series of towering cast iron 'stelae' that, despite their stacked cube formation, give a human impression. If visitors appear like children in the presence of what Gormely calls 'unstable vertical columns,' that’s precisely the point. 'By implication, they make you feel smaller and more vulnerable,' he continued. 'And yet here are these things that are curiously like child-like, like lego or blocks.'

To the right of the central hall, the installation titled Matrix II. Over the past three weeks, all 16 intersecting volumes have been constructed in situ. During our visit, craftsmen were still welding the rebar (the same 5 mm-thick metal used in cast concrete buildings), its blackened finish the result of tannic acid. At its centre: an apparent void, just large enough for two people to stand (in theory).

Whereas the experience of Expansion Field is akin to weaving through a maze of gigantic sentinels (a rather brilliant setting for hide-and-go-seek), Matrix II can only be experienced from the periphery. 'There’s nothing to recognise, no reading to be done,' Gormley said of the latter. 'Here is this environment revealed now in its skeletal form. Your body can’t penetrate it but your mind with its eyes can. And it’s a very illusory place—what’s background becomes foreground and vice versa.'

The challenge, he adds, is where and how to direct one’s focus. 'I recognise it’s quite a tall order for the uninitiated perhaps to feel the hermeticism of this when it’s so obviously not something to be read,' said the Turner Prize winner. Nonetheless, Matrix II prompts consideration of the human figure even if it suggests the artist at his least figurative; a cavity to contain two bodies seems impossible to locate amid such a dense and complex framework. As an installation that nearly fills its gallery, it is at once architectural and elemental; maybe it’s a habitat, maybe it depicts some sort of cosmic fabric.

The time-lapse video, meanwhile, captures the realisation of Matrix II three times every five minutes. Gormley, perhaps modestly, believes the final accumulation of images won’t offer much in the way of magic: 'You will just see human spiders at work on a three-dimensional web.'

ADDRESS

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 69, avenue Général Leclerc, Paris Pantin 93500

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The sleeping security guard is already the star of this year's edition of Frieze. He sits, we assume he sits there still, head propped against a wall of the Hauser & Wirth stand, snoozing oblivious, tweeted and Instagrammed, gone social, possibly even viral. It doesn't look like a happy sleep, or a tormented sleep or an active sleep, just a standard preparation for death sleep. Frieze can get you that way.

Visitors look at the tagged-up security guide and smile or think about a prod. Is he art or just a lazy sentinel? He is art of course - phew, no unpleasantness required then - actually Sleeping Guard by Christoph Büchel. And he is part of what is easily the most interesting and successfully conceived stand at the fair.

Curated by Mark Wallinger, a new signing for Hauser & Wirth, the stand is cluttered and domestic. Titled 'A Study in Red and Green', it is a take on Sigmund Freud's study in Hampstead and greater than the sum of its Louise Bourgeois, Martin Creed, Paul McCarthy, Roni Horn, Subodh Gupta (amongst others) parts. It feels nocturnal, like the seemingly random-but-not-stops of a restless unconscious. Perhaps these are the security guard's dreams. Who knows what he has seen. There are other interesting things to look at, disorientating and random in their own way, but nothing as arresting.

Carsten Höller has created a kindergarten at the Gagosian stand. Which is nice. Cory Arcangel's carpet on the Lisson Gallery stand is a success. The gallery goes big on Arcangel's video pieces and Ryan Gander's concrete sculptures and to good effect. Thomas Dane's stand is well composed and I liked the paintings by Ella Kruglyanskaya, a New York-based Latvian, at the Gavin Brown stand which looked French and flighty and funny though no one else seemed much taken.

There is a strong showing from Brazilian galleries this year, including Galeria Luisa Strina from Sao Paulo and the excellent A Gentil Carioca from Rio. They are a welcome addition to the mix, even if most of the action is around the cluster of blue chips during the press and VIP opening (how 'V' is always hard to know. The Frieze caste system remains impenetrable.)

The experience (more of an 'assault' in the past) is also generally more civilised this year. BarberOsgerby's Universal Design Studio has designed the tent and the aisles are wide and there is more air in the air but still too few places to sit down and get your bearings. The VIPs - men in art scarves and art spectacles, tottering ladies in leopard print skirts with taut, tortured looking faces - are as worth watching as ever. And listening too.

The more abundant air is kissed, dinner arrangements made (and probably forgotten) before they wobble or glide back to their idling luxury sedans which will spend much of the rest of the day snarled and stuttering amongst other luxury sedans. While our security guard, happily or unhappily, remains oblivious.

ADDRESS

Frieze London
Regent’s Park
London NW1 4PJ

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British sculptor Antony Gormley's latest exhibition at Hong Kong's White Cube gallery is a continuation of the artist's lifelong investigation of spatial awareness using his trademark abstract iron and steel sculptures to transform an exhibition space into a 'psychic and physiological testing ground.' 

'It is,' he stresses, 'the opposite of putting objects of high aesthetic value in a shop and then asking people to take them home. It is instead about turning the space into a reflective experience so they can then go out onto the street and look at the environment in a different way.' 

The eleven works arranged throughout the gallery, including stairways and passages, include smaller standalone sculptures like 'Gut XIII', a disconcertingly unstable 'blockwork' that evokes the architectural metaphor of the body as a building, and 'Ease', an enormous iron sculpture designed to obstruct the gallery entrance. The standout piece is undoubtedly 'Murmur,' a multiple 'space-frame' that fills the entire ground floor space channeling viewers into a narrow passage between the walls and the frame's central void. 

'I think that art has to return us to our inner selves. We must think about the body less as an object that can be sexualized or idealized and more as a place, a location, a condition,' says Gormley.

The artist credits Hong Kong as the inspiration for the exhibition. 

'It is a very good place to think about the human habitat. Why has our species chosen to concentrate itself in these high density environments and what does that tell us about our relationship to our fellow man?'

Gormley, who has visited the city frequently over the past decade, is fascinated by the juxtaposition of the city's extreme built environment and untouched nature, elements he says are reflected in six new works created specially for the show.  Of these, 'Place II', an ethereal human form created from slender stainless steel bars and presented in the gallery's private viewing room, certainly captures Hong Kong's unique urban dichotomy.

Gormley recommends viewing the works away from the crowds that usually flock to gallery openings.

'In my view openings are the best way to ignore art. The whole principle is to use the show as a space and if there are bodies all over the place it won't work as well. It is the viewer's movement through the coordinates of the space of the gallery that is the real subject. It is what is happening within the viewer, not the objects in the gallery.'

ADDRESS

White Cube Hong Kong
50 Connaught Road Central
Hong Kong

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