Antony Gormley: Another Place

I first learned about Antony Gormley while working for the art advisory firm in San Francisco on plans to install one of his cast-iron figures on a client's property. They wished to place the sculpture in the middle of a lake near their home, from which it would appear to be rising out of the water's surface. I don't think it was ever completed after I moved out of California, but during the project, I fell in love with his work.

Gormley has an ability to communicate both solitude and unity through his installations, which often include dozens of life size, cast-iron figures of his own body. Another Place is a great example (pictured above). Installed, and then later removed because of local politics, at Crosby Beach in England in 2005, 100 of these figures were positioned so that they faced out toward the sea. They each stood alone, spaced apart by some distance, yet at the same time they remained as a group and therefore unified in some way. It makes for an interesting tension between the two realities - separateness and solidarity. Standing among them, between these two possibilities, where would we, as the viewers and perhaps participants in the scene, have fallen?

Louise Bourgeois

A strong woman, perhaps the matriarch of the contemporary art world, outspoken (she once told the Washington Post that she "really wants to worry people, to bother people" with her work), courageous, hard-working, visionary, and prolific in her career, she continued to draw, make sculpture and paint all the way up to her death last month at the age of 98. I, like so many others in this country and throughout the world, was drawn to her work on so many levels. Her uninhibited approach to both materials and subject matters - which ranged from emotions such as anger, betrayal, even murder, and issues of sexuality, feminism and motherhood - was perhaps unmatched by any other female artist. For me personally, the image of the spider, which she wrought in both small and large scale formats, has made the most impact.

What is pictured above, the mothering, protective, and guardian spider that stands over a caged room or "cell", in which a single chair is offered behind an open door, is quite possibly the most breathtaking thing I've ever seen in person. When I first stood in front of it (or rather, in front of a similar sculpture at Dia:Beacon in upstate New York - this one is owned privately) I was both horrified and elated. And somewhere in that mix of emotions I was moved. Intellectually and spiritually moved into a different place, from which I would never be the same again.

I saw several more of these spiders last year at the Hirshhorn's retrospective exhibition of her career. They were standing at the very end of a long series of galleries, and by the time I saw them, I was more than eager and nervous about the experience, wondering if they would have the same impact as the first time. And they did -- as magnificent as I had remembered, and perhaps more so because of what I had learned about her work in the interim. And that is how her art and her life will continue, with each and every time we encounter her sculptures, drawings, or paintings, wherever they are installed.