Venture

Antony Gormley is a sculptor, and winner of the Turner Prize in 1994. Gormley's drawings are mostly self-sufficient works, not direct studies for sculpture, but nevertheless share some of the same concerns. He describes drawing as "an attempt to fix the world, not as it is, but as it exists inside me." Casts of his own body are often his starting point for sculptures, and in Venture he suggests something of this experience of being enclosed, of being inside. The drawing evokes the darkness inside his hollow lead figures, and the claustrophobic experience of being encased in plaster. The figure holds up an unidentified implement (perhaps a pencil or a scalpel) which appears to open a chink of light in the enveloping blackness.