Antony Gormley opens ‘what us hold us’ in Italy
Inside its former cinema-theatre The gallery continues in San Gimignano, Antony Gormley turns the body into a small town. This last one reportWhat Holds Us moves through the 14th century walls, theater space, thresholds and gallery exterior, using the Tuscan hill town as both setting and structural pressure. Stone, clay, concrete, iron and cardboard all enter the work, with each material having a different sense of weight, fragility and time.
The exhibition, which will be on display from May 9 to September 13, 2026, begins with the question in its title. What supports a body? What does it contain? What gives the built world a sense of permanence, even when its systems are provisional, temporary, and easily torn down? Gormley approaches these questions sculpture that asks visitors to walk, look, bend and move en masse through the scale of the architecture.
Antony Gormley, 2026. image by Come on Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA
Innercity: a cardboard maze
The gallery continuesThe central space of the theater is occupied by Innercity, a specific installation for What Holds Us made by Antony Gormley from fifteen giant paper ‘body buildings’. Some forms open up to the visitor, while others block movement or draw the eye towards small openings. THE artist it turns anatomy into architecture, with edges, cavities and volumes translating into a labyrinth that feels playful and slightly unstable.
The cardboard gives the installation the most intense tension. It’s ordinary, lightweight, and global in its circulation, the same hardware that carries billions of packages around the world every year. In San Gimignano, a town shaped by medieval towers and thick masonry, Gormley uses this consumable material to build a temporary city of bodies. The contrast gives the work its charge without pushing the point.
Antony Gormley, BIG PRESS, 2026. image by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy of the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA © the artist
Stone, clay, concrete and iron press against the building
Around the Innercity, Gormley works with heavier substances. Basalt Blockworks leans against the old gallery walls, using stacking as both structure and danger. The sculptures depend on the building for support, reversing the usual relationship between figure and architecture. At first they appear stable and then reveal a state of stress.
Terracotta Slabworks magnifies the body to twice life size and brings two figures together through stacked dead weights. A concrete bunker, titled Skew II, sits at the base of a collapsed tower, with an opening in place of the mouth offering a view into a dark interior. Nearby works in concrete, stone, iron and terracotta continue Gormley’s long preoccupation with mass, void, enclosure and the position of the body within built space.
Antony Gormley, What Holds Us, 2026, exhibition view, GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano. image by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy of the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA © the artist
A body seen through the city
Recent designs extend the exhibition’s attention to thresholds. They detect dark openings and openings where light penetrates, echoing the physical experience of movement through the gallery itself. Outside, the sculptures are set against the Tuscan landscape, shifting the work from indoor pressure to the open air.
In What Holds Us, Gormley treats the city as something felt through the body before it is understood as design. The exhibition brings together architecture, material and human scale in a single spatial encounter, asking how much of what surrounds us is solid and how much depends on the fragile structures we continue to rebuild around us.
Antony Gormley, What Holds Us, 2026, exhibition view, GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano. image by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy of the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA © the artist
‘As a sculptor, I speak in the language of things: matter, with the belief that all matter has meaning. The possibility of a world begins with the possibility of a body — I want to reimagine both,‘ says Antony Gormley.
‘I hope this exhibition will open up a built world we take for granted and allow us to experience it as if for the first time – a view shared by newborns and artists.‘
Antony Gormley, TOGETHER, 2025. image by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy of the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA © the artist
