Shifting ground: British artist Antony Gormley brings lifetime’s work to The Hague

When you stand inside the end of ‘Passage’ – a 12-metre tunnel in the shape of a mechanical man – the outlook is frighteningly black. ‘Antony Gormley is one of the most important and most celebrated artists of these times, a maker and a thinker, and we are carried through his thought process through this exhibition,’ she said. ‘It’s our most ambitious exhibition so far: for the first time, our grounds are really part of it, he reacts to them and has really thought about where to place things in relation to nature, and man-made nature.’ The museum, which first bought a Gormley work in 1994 and commissioned the young sculptor to make Still Leaping, then invited him for the opening of the new building in 2016 began discussing Ground five years ago. ‘He sees exhibitions as a kind of testing site, where he can experiment – but the viewer is the most important part because you are the one who sees and experiences the work.’ Future The show ranges from Gormley’s earliest sketchbooks to works he made as a student, a new version of My Clothes pinned to the wall and eerie iron figures reminiscent of his Turner Prize winning Testing a World View. In one room, 24,000 tiny clay bodies, created with young adults from Brazilian favelas, stare at the viewer, asking dumbly – in Gormley’s words ‘what kind of future are you making for your children’s children?’ In Breathing Room III, the audience is plunged into darkness with only the luminous lines of a kind of 3D sketch to navigate the room.