I grew up going to the De La Warr Pavillion in Bexhill on Sea with my Grandma so I am very excited to see this exhibition happening.

Critical Mass, one of Gormley’s best known works, is an installation made up of 60 life-size cast iron body forms which will be displayed on the roof of the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea on the south-east coast of England. The Del la Warr was built in 1935 by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff and was the first building to built in the modernist style in the UK.

Critical Massis made up of five casts from 12 discrete moulds of Gormley’s body, developing from a low crouching position to squatting, sitting, kneeling and standing – an ascent of man ranging through the complex syntax of the body.

The term Critical Mass comes from nuclear physics and is the necessary density within a radioactive isotope for fission to take place. When applied to social issues, Critical Mass usually means the necessary level of density within a collective that allows for something transformative to happen. In this case, the bodies appear to have fallen from their normal context. The first impression is of some kind of trauma, perhaps an act of violence perpetrated towards the masses such as terrorism or genocide (the work was originally made for a huge railway terminus in Austria, thus consciously connecting it to the victims of the Jewish holocaust). There is also reference to the fact that most of us in the western world co-exist within carefully constructed urban matrices where the spaces between us are as significant as the walls that contain us.

Critical Masswas made in 1995 in direct response to the Remise railway terminus in Vienna. Although it has been exhibited in several major solo shows throughout Europe, and in part in the Hayward Blind Light exhibition in 2007, this is the first time it has been exhibited as a whole in the UK since the Tate St. Ives exhibition in 2001.