A cast of Antony Gormley? Or a pair of giant conkers? Gormley’s RA show reviewed

While Sir Joshua Reynolds, on his plinth, was looking the other way, a little girl last Saturday morning was trying to prise a littler sculpture from the pavement of the Royal Academy’s courtyard. For all its tininess — from a distance the sculpture’s curvy lumps, 12 x 28 x 17cm, resemble horse droppings a security guard might dig into their rose bed — she couldn’t shift it.

‘Iron Baby’ (1999) is a solid iron cast made by Sir Antony Gormley of his six-day- old daughter abased before the Enlightenment temple of art, buttocks facing Piccadilly in eloquent critique. But for the Instagramming hordes, you might step over her heedlessly on the way to the exhibition, a survey of Gormley’s works from the late 1970s to today.

Many of the 69-year-old’s career-long preoccupations are inside — the dialectics of tough vs tender, bodily erotics vs rational geometries, void vs the infinitely dense, body in space as against body of space — but no more so than in this abandoned baby outside. Gormley says she is made from the same material as the Earth’s core, filled with potential like a bomb and yet nakedly vulnerable as, apparently, she ‘attempts to make us aware of our precarious position in relation to our planetary future’.

But that makes this heartbreaking, wingless angel of the South sound like a pre-verbal Greta Thunberg. Thankfully, ever since Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, it’s been possible to read art against the grain of artists’ statements. In one room, for instance, two huge spheres dangle, suspended from the skylight. ‘Body’ and ‘Fruit’ (both 1991/93) are made from casts of Gormley in a foetal position. They call to mind, the gallery guide told me, ‘the formation of planetary bodies, and the ever-expanding universe’.