It’s impossible not to be astonished by the sheer virtuosity of Adriaen de Vries’s Antiope and Theseus. Born in The Hague, de Vries (about 1556–1626) was the most famous sculptor of his time, working for royal courts across Europe, particularly in Prague, now Czechia. He learned a lot from the serpentine extensions and compressions of the body employed by his one-time master, the Flanders-born, Italy-based Giambologna — especially in the Abduction of a Sabine Woman (now in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence) — and inherited from both him and Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini a Mannerist wish to elongate form. In de Vries’s hands, however, this was amplified by an even more radical desire: to escape from the bounding condition so inherent to sculpture.
Adriaen de Vries used the strength of bronze to give the illusion of lift in his work ‘Antiope and Theseus’.
(Image credit: Royal Collection Trust/Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2026)
From all points of view, Antiope and Theseus (about 1600–01, Royal Collection) breaks its own edge and in doing so constantly teeters on the edge of instability. All of this is exaggerated in the way that its liquid surfaces continually reflect light. It is impossible for me not to honour the extraordinary casting virtuosity and how de Vries wanted to free the work from gravity and the ground. Look at how Theseus’s right foot steps out from the base and how his left foot is only attached by the big toe. How do you manage to cast such a detailed and dispersed perimeter, from Theseus’s right toe to Antiope’s left index finger — let alone the tips of her bow? The most spectacular answer is by channelling the flow of molten bronze through Theseus’s penis.
You may think that you could not find a more radical contrast to de Vries than my work Reflect, but they both deal with balance. I have eschewed all representation in favour of addressing balance itself. Here, we have 17 stacked blocks that evoke a self-reflexive human space in space. In contrast to de Vries, I have been intent on removing gesture and allowing the stillness and silence of sculpture to engage with questions of being.
The two bodies in my column share a head, the lower one looking up, the upper one looking down (but as it is inverted, it, too, is looking up). At the core of this work is a question about sculpture itself and the materialisation of imagination that it involves — the upper body being a product of the lower body’s mind.
Sir Antony Gormley’s 2017 piece ‘Reflect’ reduces two human forms down to 17 blocks of solid, rusty-red iron
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist/Stephen White)
Perhaps the biggest distinction between our two pieces is that I am using iron — a concentrated earth material in its pure form — and my work is a solid mass. In contrast, the de Vries sculpture is a bronze bubble with a skin rarely more than quarter of an inch thick. My surfaces demonstrate that all matter is in motion and celebrate this through an evolving rusty-red patina that absorbs light. De Vries is the opposite: his waxed and polished surfaces depend on careful conservation and continual polishing.
I hope that what unites us is our belief that sculpture, in its stillness, can encourage us to walk around the work and feel our own embodiment and connection to the earth.
