artist monograph to publish fall 2025
Antony Gormley, Body Buildings is an upcoming monograph that documents the British artist’s recent solo exhibition at Galleria Continua in Beijing. The book further reflects on his three-decade engagement with the cultural and architectural landscape of China. Set for U.S. release by Skira on October 7th, 2025, the hardcover volume brings together sculpture, drawing, and archival material to explore the evolving relationship between body and built environment.
The book is organized around the exhibition Body Buildings, which ran from November 14th, 2024 — April 14th, 2025. It foregrounds Gormley’s use of clay and iron — materials fundamental to both construction and the earth itself — as a medium for probing the spatial conditions of urban life. At the center 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.
Antony Gormley, Body Buildings, cover | image courtesy SKIRA
Sculpture as Spatial Inquiry
Photographic documentation of the Body Buildings exhibition situates Antony Gormley’s sculptures within the architecture of the gallery and the city beyond it. These pieces, often geometric and massed from block-like volumes, trace the human figure within architectural constraints, suggesting a reciprocal influence between physical form and structural order. The sculptures are never illustrative. Instead, they operate as spatial propositions, articulating how the body occupies the space or yields to the logic of construction.
This line of inquiry is extended through the artist’s drawings, many of which appear in published form for the first time in this volume. With media ranging from walnut ink to blood, the drawings are investigative rather than preparatory, offering a daily practice that parallels and deepens the sculptural process. Their tactile surfaces and sedimentary layers evoke geological and corporeal processes, reinforcing the shared material language between human and environment.
the book documents Antony Gormley’s Beijing exhibition, Body Buildings
anthony gormley’s dialogue with china
Alongside documentation of recent work, Antony Gormley, Body Buildings includes an image-based essay that traces the artist’s sustained relationship with China and its architecture — from his first research trip in 1995 to major installations such as Asian Field (2003), Event Horizon (2007), and Host (2016). The photo essay, drawn from Gormley’s own archive, follows a route from the Forbidden City to Xi’an’s Terracotta Army, recording sites that have continued to inform the conceptual and formal underpinnings of his work.
The publication includes newly commissioned essays by curator Hou Hanru and literary historian Stephen Greenblatt. Their contributions contextualize the evolution of this body of work within both regional history and a broader philosophical frame, locating Gormley’s inquiry within global conversations about embodiment, urbanism, and scale.
sculptures and drawings explore body and architecture
clay and iron evoke shared material origins
a photo essay traces the artist’s early trips to China
Resting Place II anchors the new installation work
the publication includes essays by curator Hou Hanru and literary historian Stephen Greenblatt
unpublished drawings reveal Gormley’s daily practice
project info:
name: Antony Gormley, Body Buildings
artist: Antony Gormley
publisher: Skira | @skira_arte
author: Stephen Greenblatt, Antony Gormley, Hou Hanru
gallery: Galleria Continua, Beijing
publication: October 7th, 2025 (U.S.)
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