Published on the occasion of Antony Gormley’s exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard (April - June 2025), WITNESS charts the artist’s experimentations with lead between the 1970s and 1990s, addressing artistic, ecological, and political concerns. From early experimentations pertaining to the material alchemical properties and potentials of lead, to the later large-scale body sculptures contending with the intrinsic stillness and silence of the form, Gormley’s preoccupation with lead enabled a fertile visual language to develop.

Designed by (Studio) Jonathan Hares, WITNESS serves as a companion to catalogue accompanying Gormley’s exhibition, Body Politic (published by White Cube in 2023), and features extensive installation and artwork views tracing the evolution of his sculptural practice across scale, time and form. Using the title of the exhibition as a thematic through which to examine the works, Jorella Andrews considers the relevance of Gormley’s enduring interest in the figure of ‘the witness’ within the contemporary world. An in-conversation with Lucia Pietroiusti explores a career-long exercise in finding balance in the human-ecological relationship.

Edited and co-ordinated by Michael Green and Honey Luard
Texts by Jorella Andrews, Susan May, Antony Gormley and Lucia Pietroiusti
Designed by (Studio) Jonathan Hares
Printed by Robstolk, Netherlands
230 x 160 mm, softback
112 pages, colour illustrations throughout
ISBN 978-1-910844-78-6
Published by White Cube, April 2025

Jorella Andrews is Professor Emeritus of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. Trained as a fine artist, her research and writing focus on relations between philosophical inquiry (notably phenomenology), the image-world and art practice. Among her varied publications are two monographs published by Bloomsbury, The Question of Painting: Rethinking Thought with Merleau-Ponty (2018) and Showing Off! A Philosophy of Image (2014).

Susan May is Global Artistic Director at White Cube. Previously she was Head of the UK’s Arts Council Collection and held curatorial positions at Tate Modern and the Hayward Gallery, London.

Lucia Pietroiusti is Head of Ecologies at Serpentine, London, where she founded the General Ecology project. Working at the intersection of art, ecology and systems, she is the curator of Sun & Sea (Venice Biennale, 2019 and international tour) and the co-editor of the reader, More-than-Human (2020).