Antony Gormley, HOME AND THE WORLD II, 1986-96; Lead, fibreglass, plaster, steel and air, 192 x 548.5 x 57 cm. Photograph by Stephen White & Co.© the artist

The first thing that comes to mind when looking at Anthony Gormley’s As Above So Below I (1986), a drawing with oil and charcoal that’s part of “Witness” at White Cube Mason’s Yard is, naturally, da Vinci. Gormley’s drawing of a human form with outstretched, angular limbs feels like an echo of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (1490). But where da Vinci’s drawing, inspired by the writing of a Roman architect, is designed to let the artist explore what he considered to be ideal human proportions, Gormley’s work is stranger, more uncanny. The figures in As Above So Below are flipped; what seems at first glance to be a face appears not just at the top of the image, but in the middle, where the hips and groins of these two figures are joined. One figure has its arms fully extended, while the other is angular. There’s nothing ideal about this overlaying of bodies, and at times, it barely even feels human.

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It’s this relationship to humanity, which isn’t a complete lack, but instead a kind of gradual letting go of it, a gesture towards whatever might lie beyond our current, fleshy forms, that animates “Witness,” alongside several other recent exhibitions of sculpture in London and beyond. In one room of White Cube Mason’s Yard are a series of Gormley’s vast, lead sculptures; all apart from each other, like a group of people frozen in a moment of conflict. But more than that, none of them are looking at each other, and some seem to be further away from the memory of human forms than others. In one corner of the room is Witness II (1993), a figure sitting with its arms folded and head down, buried beneath heavy limbs; in the centre of the room is Home and the World II (1986-96), a human, or at least human-adjacent, figure standing tall, frozen in motion. But atop their neck isn’t a head but a vast structure, what looks like a letterbox, and seems to be longer than the figure itself is tall. These two, sharing space with other lead figures, seem to capture some kind of trajectory—an idea of what might........

© Observer