26 October 2010 - 12 June 2011

DRAWING SPACE was the largest exhibition in Italy to date of drawings by Antony Gormley, presenting the evolution of his works on paper and the relationship that these graphic explorations have to the development of his sculpture. Especially conceived for the exhibition spaces of MACRO, the show highlighted four key sculptures which demonstrate how line has migrated from the surface of the paper to architectural space. The exhibition began with diagrammatic works from 1981, when in a small room in Kings Cross, London, Gormley made his first drawings in black oil paint and charcoal, pinning the paper to the wall. In the artist's words: 'the sculpture would not have been possible without these drawings'. The exhibition continued with the night landscapes of the 1990s, where connnections are sought between 'the body as a place' and 'space at large', and concluded with the most recent linear works, where 'line is liberated from the burden of description and is celebrated as an energising principle used to activate space for the viewer'. Drawing has long been one of Gormley's core activities: a means to move away from the slow process of sculpture towards more immediate expressions of thought and feeling beyond the body. The drawings exhibited here charted intimate movements of the hand, the body, and the artist's unconscious intuition, possessing a range and intensity that characterises them as works in their own right. Through the behaviour of line, mineral, and medium, the drawings become a means by which the process of 'seeing in making' is revealed.