Antony Gormley examines the architecture of the human condition in What Holds Us

Galleria Continua presents What Holds Us, a solo exhibition by the British sculptor Antony Gormley, on view from May 9 – September 13, 2026, at their San Gimignano location in Italy. The art exhibition explores “our condition as urban animals through the resonance of different materials, from primordial stone and clay to industrial concrete and iron, culminating in the most universal and insubstantial medium: Cardboard,” Galleria Continua notes in the official release.

Occupying the gallery's indoor and outdoor spaces, the contemporary art exhibition brings together works that explore what Gormley describes as the fundamental conditions of human experience. “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. I hope this [is] granted and allows us to experience it as if for the first time—a point of view shared by newborn and artist,” the contemporary artist notes in the official release.

The exhibition’s centrepiece is INNERCITY (2026), a site-specific art installation that transforms the gallery's main theatre space into a labyrinth of 15 towering cardboard structures, reimagining the city as a living body while questioning the permanence of the environments we inhabit. The large-scale installation “invites us to move between and through their open and closed spaces, which either deny us access or suggest that we crawl inside them. These works reinvent the body’s anatomy in the language of architecture,” the art gallery explains.

What Holds Us also features a series of basalt ‘Blockworks’, sculptural stacks that engage directly with the gallery's medieval architecture. “These works treat the gallery itself as intrinsic to the work, reversing the dynamic of the caryatid by depending on the 14th-century walls for support, conveying a sense of dependency while embodying a potential for collapse,” Continua notes.

Elsewhere, terracotta ‘Slabworks’ combine two human forms through stacked masses that resemble houses of cards, suggesting intimacy, connection and shared vulnerability. A new concrete work, Skew II (2026), occupies the base of a collapsed tower-like structure. Scattered throughout are life-size and half-scale sculptures in stone, iron, concrete and terracotta that continue Gormley's investigation into mass and the body's relationship to space. Outside the gallery, sculptures are positioned against the backdrop of the Tuscan landscape.

“What Holds Us engages the viewer in a trajectory of experience that moves from confrontation to exploration, questioning what supports us, what contains us and what we believe to be permanent,” Galleria Continua states.