Legendary British sculptor Antony Gormley has spent decades focusing on the human body, exploring both its relationship with nature and the built environment. His latest exhibition, What Holds Us, continues that exploration through sculptures made from industrial materials including clay, concrete, iron, and cardboard, diving into what it means to exist as “urban animals.”
The exhibition is located at GALLERIA CONTINUA in San Gimignano, a medieval hill town surrounded by the rolling Tuscan countryside. This location has offered humans shelter for centuries, making it the perfect location for Gormley to highlight the contrast between enduring architecture and the fast-paced consumer culture of today.
The main gallery has been transformed into an immersive installation—titled Innercity (2026)—featuring a labyrinth of 15 giant cardboard bodies. Gormley uses the everyday material to create a playful version of the modern city, inviting visitors to crawl through the giant human forms. Built from the same cardboard used to deliver billions of Amazon packages every year, the temporary structures contrast with the surrounding medieval architecture, highlighting the shift from a world built to last to one overrun with disposable material.
At the gallery entrance, visitors are greeted by a series of stacked basalt sculptures called Blockworks. Rather than standing independently, these heavy stone, humanistic forms lean against the gallery’s walls for support, as if they’re resting. Elsewhere in the gallery, Gormley’s Slabworks are made from terracotta forms that are twice the size of a human body—they are “two bodies built like houses of cards that support each other.”
Throughout the exhibition, visitors will also find life-sized and smaller abstract human figures made from concrete, iron, stone, and terracotta. Together, they capture Gormley’s ongoing fascination with the human body and our relationship to the spaces around us.
“As a sculptor, I speak in the language of stuff: matter, in the belief that all matter has meaning,” says Gormley. “The possibility of a world starts with the possibility of a body—I want to reimagine both.” The artist adds, “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.”
What Holds Us is on view now until September 13, 2026 at GALLERIA CONTINUA in Tuscany.
Antony Gormley’s exhibition—What Holds Us—at GALLERIA CONTINUA in San Gimignano, Italy, explores what it means to exist as “urban animals.”
It features abstract figurative sculptures made from from industrial materials including clay, concrete, iron, and cardboard.
The main gallery has been transformed into an immersive installation—titled Innercity (2026)—featuring a labyrinth of 15 giant cardboard bodies.
Gormley uses the everyday material to create a playful version of the modern city, inviting visitors to crawl through the giant human forms.
Humanistic forms lean against the gallery’s walls for support, as if they’re resting.
Exhibition Information:
Antony Gormley
What Holds Us
May 9 – September 13, 2026
GALLERIA CONTINUA
Via del Castello 11, 53037 San Gimignano, Italy
Antony Gormley: Website
My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Antony Gormley / GALLERIA CONTINUA.
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