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Antony Gormley
born 1950
Testing a World View
1993
Cast iron

Presented by the artist (Building the Tate Collection) 2005
T12034

Testing a World View was shown at the Tate Gallery in 1994 as part of Antony Gormley’s Turner Prize installation. It consists of five identical iron bodies arranged in varying relationships to the architectural space in which they are installed. Accordingly, the figures evoke different states of mind ranging, in Gormley’s words, from ‘hysteria, head-banging, catatonia, to the awakened dead and the about-to-be-beheaded’. He has described the work as ‘a kind of psychological Cubism…. The piece expresses the polymorphousness of the self; that in different places we become different, and I think this is physical.’ Tate is grateful to the artist for this exceptionally generous gift.

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Click on images for more about each highlight

• Christopher Wood
  1901–30
  Zebra and Parachute
  1930
• Barbara Hepworth
  1903–75
  Spring
  1966
• Mary Martin
  1907–69
  Perspex Group on Orange (B)
  1969
• Antony Gormley
  born 1950
  Testing a World View
  1993
• Martin Boyce
  born 1967
  From ‘Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours’
  2002
• Chris Ofili
  born 1968
  The Upper Room
  1999–2002
• Gilbert & George
  born 1943 / born 1942
  Fates
  2005
• Richard Long
  born 1945
  Red Slate Circle
  1988
• John Latham
  1921–2006
  Full Stop
  1961