Geestgrond
May 23–September 20, 2026
The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) presents Antony Gormley. Geestgrond (May 23 to September 20, 2026), the most comprehensive exhibition in continental Europe of the internationally celebrated British sculptor Antony Gormley. Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, known world-wide for visionary exhibitions, this project is a unique artist-curator collaboration, which engages with the museum’s rich collection and extends outside towards Antwerp’s River Scheldt.
“My work asks the questions: What can sculpture do and what does it mean to be alive?” —Antony Gormley
In Geestgrond, Antony Gormley brings together over 100 works spanning more than six decades. Sculptures in stone, clay, wood, glass, bread, iron, lead, and steel trace the evolution of a practice that persistently asks what it means to be a body in the world. This exhibition presents Gormley’s work in dialogue with both the architecture of the museum and works by artists from the collection of KMSKA.
Installed throughout the museum and extending beyond it, Geestgrond unfolds as a continuous spatial experience rather than a sequence of isolated galleries. It reveals Gormley’s sustained contribution to contemporary sculpture and his ongoing investigation of the body as a site of knowledge—grounded, vulnerable, and relational—at a time of radical technological transformation.
“The exhibition’s title, Geestgrond,” states Christov-Bakargiev, “is a deliberately resistant word whose meaning lies in tension rather than resolution. Combining the Dutch words geest (spirit, mind, breath) with grond (earth, soil, foundation), the term binds weight to thought and matter to spirit, grounding what thinks and giving density to what seems immaterial. Both linguistic and geological, Geestgrond evokes the Ice Age–formed terrains, native to the Low Countries, shaped through long cultivation and care. The title refuses the split between the spiritual and the material, the human and the planetary. Geestgrond reveals the roots and relevance of an artistic practice that began in the twentieth century, after a period marked by tremendous industrial inhumanity, and has flourished in the twenty-first century through a sustained understanding of planetary more than human relations. The exhibition asks an urgent question: what does it mean to be human in an age of algorithms and machine learning? How can we understand gravity and grace, the agentic and the angelic conditions of our times, as bound together through sculpture and forms of love—these are aesthetic, scientific, theological and philosophical questions that are urgent today.’
This condition is central to Gormley’s work. From early lead body casts that assert presence through mass and gravity, to later porous, networked forms (“Domains,” “Weave Works”) and up to the recent “Branchers,” including “Attend” (2025) premiering in this exhibition, the body stands in space while remaining insistently grounded.
At KMSKA, Christov-Bakargiev has placed Gormley’s sculpture in dialogue with works from the museum’s rich historic collection, including a 14th-century Flemish “Crucifixion“ and “Grey Seascape” (1880) and “Man of Sorrows” (1891) by Belgian proto-expressionist painter James Ensor. Sculpture is explored through encounters ranging from a hieratic late medieval polychrome “Sedes sapientiae” (the Madonna as the Seat of Wisdom) to Rodin’s “Fallen Caryatid” (1881-1882 / cast 1924) and a modernist welded iron mask by Julio González (1930–33).
“The KMSKA provides the ideal framework for this exhibition, enabling a dialogue between contemporary art, the old masters, and the architecture and new spaces of the recently renovated museum. Gormley is an artist who activates places. His work derives its meaning from the context in which it is presented. He starts from the body and invites physical and mental interaction: you move through the sculptures and through the space. This perfectly aligns with the DNA of KMSKA as a hybrid museum, where art activates people, rather than leaving them as passive viewers.” —Carmen Willems, General Director, KMSKA
“What if art did not just stand before you but stood with you, quietly shifting how you inhabit space, time, and self? This exhibition explores the need for art to address the human condition in our era of radical change. What does it mean to be human in an age of AI? Can sculpture help us become more present and more rooted? This exhibition also presents a section called “The Heart,” a constellation of early notebooks, sketches, travel photographs, annotated books and a range of other materials—creating a dynamic dataset of a single human being: Gormley’s own.” —Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, exhibition curator
This exhibition has been made possible thanks to the support of the Flemish Government, Delen Private Bank and Xavier Hufkens.
Antony Gormley biography.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev biography.
About the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA)
The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA) is the largest art museum in Flanders. It boasts absolute masterpieces by the Flemish Primitives and the Antwerp Baroque, as well as an extensive collection of modern art featuring Rik Wouters, Henri de Braekeleer and René Magritte. The museum offers two worlds in one, with old masters in the historic galleries and modern masters in the new volume. The jewel in the crown is the largest collection of the painter James Ensor in the world. He is the pivotal point between both worlds. The KMSKA has also devised a varied programme of activities that focuses on experiencing art. As a creative hub, KMSKA actively works on crossovers with the broader cultural sector.
International press
For interviews, enquiries and press visits: Sarah Greenberg, Evergreen Arts, London: T +44 (0)7866543242 / sgreenberg@evergreen-arts.com
www.evergreen-arts.com
For HR images: Panagiotis Panagopoulos: ppanagopoulos@evergreen-arts.com.
Click here for image sheet
Benelux press:
Lore Jans, KMSKA Press and PR: lore.jans@kmska.be / T +32 476239473
