Antony Gormley
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
A floor-level flood of 40,000 red, yellow, brown, and orange figurines, Field filled the halls and pressed against the walls of the museum, barring one’s entry. A population explosion of metasculptural archetypes, Antony Gormley’s installation challenged many of the West’s sacred assumptions about art—the perpetual refinement of form, the notion that completion realizes intention, and the idea that uniqueness equals value. Whereas critics of Rodin’s era referred to his immortalized Balzac, 1897–98, as a hunk of mud, these sculptures actually are hunks of mud, hollow-eyed terra-cotta figurines