One of the Royal Academy of Arts’ historic main galleries is to be flooded with water and mud for a major solo exhibition devoted to the work of Antony Gormley.
Other spaces will be “engineered” to take some of the more technically challenging works made by an artist best known for landmark public sculptures, such as the Angel of the North, and the casts of his body which are installed across the world from Crosby beach to the Austrian Alps.
The RA announced details of its 2019 exhibition programme on Monday. It will also include a Phyllida Barlow show, Lucian Freud self-portraits, an exploration of the Renaissance nude, and the first UK exhibition devoted to a Finnish artist few in Britain have heard of but the RA believes deserves recognition, Helene Schjerfbeck.
The Gormley show will be a mix of his new and old work reconfigured for the RA spaces, said artistic director Tim Marlow.
A key piece is called HOST, which Gormley first made in 1991 when he flooded a room in the old city jail of Charleston, South Carolina, with mud and sea water from the city’s harbour. He did a similar thing in Kiel, Germany, in 1997 using 5,000 litres of mud from inland Saxony and 5,000 litres of water from Kiel harbour, and in Beijing in 2016, using red clay and sea water from the nearby Tianjin coast.
Where the water comes from next year remains to be seen. “To be determined,” said Marlow. “I don’t think it’s going to be stinking Thames mud.” While the water will not be deep he stressed it will be for visitors to look at rather than wade through.
Another big work will be a version of one called Clearing, which is up to 7km of metal rod made in to a giant drawing in space. “We’ve started to engineer some of the main galleries, so that they can take some of the installations we’re looking at.”
The Gormley show follows RA shows where Anish Kapoor, David Hockney and Ai Weiwei have taken over what are huge, potentially daunting gallery spaces. In 2020 the performance artist Marina Abramović will become the first woman to tackle the galleries.
The RA announced nine exhibitions instead of its usual six after its £56m expansion which opened this year, linking its two buildings and increasing public space by 70%. It will begin the year with the already announced and much anticipated show pairing the pioneering video artist Bill Viola with drawings by Michelangelo.
Two of the most revelatory shows in 2019 may be those devoted to artists the RA will argue have been overlooked in the UK: the Swiss artist Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) and the Schjerfbeck (1862-1946), who is represented in British public collections by just a single work – a picture of chickens and haystacks owned by Penlee House Gallery and Museum in Penzance.
Marlow said Schjerfbeck was an icon in her native Finland and he predicted she would emerge, after the RA show, “as one of the most compelling painters of figurative modernism”.
