LELYSTAD.- After 5 years of planning and development the city of Lelystad in the Netherlands presents the 6th Flevoland landscape project: Antony Gormley’s Exposure. Permanently sited 1 kilometer from the shore of Lelystad on the dyke that connects Friesland and Flevoland, this is the artist’s largest and most complex singular sculptural project, standing 25 meters high and weighing 60 tonnes.

The work celebrates a transformation in Gormley’s attempt to evoke the body as a place, transforming his sculptural language from a defined closed surface to an open 3-dimensional drawing-in-space that maps the inner volume of the body and establishes a link between body and space at large.

The mass formally associated with the monumental Angel of the North is here replaced by a transparent and porous tracery through which we can register the changing conditions of light and weather and through which an intimate connection with the landscape at large can be made.

Flevoland is a region without history wrested from the sea a mere 50 years ago. Placed halfway along this dike, facing the sea, the work provides a contemplative register of uncertain size, balanced between the made and natural worlds.

Exposure is a collective expression in more than one sense: a body made out of 5,000 elements, each of which has a unique position and length. The structure is a random matrix with no defined load path and no orthogonal construction logic, with the elements in a variety of angle-sections connected in 547 nodes with 14,000 bolts. Its complexity has evolved through both physical and digital models over a three and half year project during which the artist collaborated with the digital design research centres at Cambridge University, University College London and Royal Haskoning, culminating with the manufacture of the work in Scotland by the pylon manufacturers Had-Fab. The sculpture has taken 18 months to fabricate and install.