antony gormley fills italy’s galleria continua with bodies built like labyrinth cities
By kat barandy I designboom
Inside the former cinema-theater of Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, Antony Gormley turns the body into a small city. This latest exhibition, What Holds Us, moves through the gallery’s 14th-century walls, theatre space, thresholds, and exterior views, using the Tuscan hill town as both setting and structural pressure. Stone, clay, concrete, iron, and cardboard all enter the work, each material carrying a different sense of weight, fragility, and time.
The exhibition, on view from May 9th to September 13th, 2026, begins with the question held in its title. What supports a body? What contains it? What gives the built world its feeling of permanence, even when its systems are temporary, provisional, and easily torn down? Gormley approaches these questions through sculpture that asks visitors to walk, look, crouch, and move around mass at the scale of architecture.
Antony Gormley, 2026. image by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio © the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA
Galleria Continua’s main theater space is occupied by Innercity, a site-specific installation for What Holds Us made by Antony Gormley from fifteen giant cardboard ‘body buildings.’ Some forms open to the visitor, while others block movement or draw the eye toward small apertures. The artist turns anatomy into architecture, with limbs, cavities, and volumes translated into a labyrinth that feels both playful and slightly unstable.
Cardboard gives the installation its sharpest tension. It is ordinary, light, and global in its circulation, the same material that carries billions of packages across the world each year. In San Gimignano, a town shaped by medieval towers and thick masonry, Gormley uses this disposable material to build a temporary city of bodies. The contrast gives the work its charge without forcing the point.
Antony Gormley, BIG PRESS, 2026. image by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA © the artist
Around Innercity, Gormley works with heavier substances. Basalt Blockworks lean into the gallery’s old walls, using stacking as both structure and risk. The sculptures depend on the building for support, reversing the usual relationship between figure and architecture. They appear stable at first, then reveal a condition of strain.
The terracotta Slabworks enlarge the body to twice life-size and bring two figures into contact through stacked deadweight. A concrete Bunker, titled Skew II, sits at the base of a collapsed tower, with an opening at the mouth position offering a view into a dark interior. Nearby works in concrete, stone, iron, and terracotta continue Gormley’s long engagement with mass, void, enclosure, and the body’s place inside built space.
Antony Gormley, What Holds Us, 2026, exhibition view, GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano. image by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA © the artist
Recent drawings extend the exhibition’s attention to thresholds. They trace dark openings and apertures where light breaks through, echoing the physical experience of moving through the gallery itself. Outside, sculptures are placed against the Tuscan landscape, shifting the work from interior pressure to open air.
Across What Holds Us, Gormley treats the city as something felt through the body before it is understood as a plan. The exhibition gathers architecture, material, and human scale into a single spatial encounter, asking how much of what surrounds us is solid, and how much depends on the fragile structures we keep rebuilding around ourselves.
Antony Gormley, What Holds Us, 2026, exhibition view, GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano. image by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA © the artist
‘As a sculptor, I speak in the language of stuff: matter, in the belief that all matter has meaning. The possibility of a world starts with the possibility of a body — I want to re-imagine both,‘ says Antony Gormley.
‘I hope this exhibition opens up a built world that we take for granted and allows us to experience it as if for the first time – a point of view shared by newborn and artist.‘
Antony Gormley, TOGETHER, 2025. image by Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA © the artist
This article was originally published by Designboom.