British Artist Gormley Brings Cardboard Immersion to San Gimignano

Antony Gormley, the British sculptor behind the 'Angel of the North' in Gateshead and 'Event Horizon' in New York, has opened an exhibition titled "What Holds Us" at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, Tuscany. According to Forbes, the centerpiece is "Innercity", which marks the first time Gormley has worked in cardboard and represents one of his most immersive works to date. The shift away from his signature cast-iron and bronze toward a material at once fragile and ubiquitous signals a departure in his artistic method.

Gormley's practice has long engaged with the human body and its relationship to space. His monumental public works—installed in cities from London to New York—have established him as a sculptor of architectural ambition. The cardboard works at San Gimignano introduce a material economy and ephemerality that contrast sharply with the permanence of his earlier pieces. Forbes notes that the exhibition represents Gormley's quest to "reconnect us with the physical world", a thematic return to embodied experience.

San Gimignano, the medieval walled town in central Tuscany, has long attracted international art tourism alongside its conventional heritage visitors. Galleria Continua, the contemporary gallery housed in the town's historic fabric, has positioned San Gimignano as a secondary node in the international art circuit—a counterpoint to Florence's museum-heavy reputation. The exhibition suggests how Tuscan towns beyond the capital are beginning to compete for serious contemporary practice, not merely to house it as a postcard backdrop.

The choice of San Gimignano for this exhibition is deliberate. The town's vertical towers and compressed medieval geometry create a specific spatial context that Gormley's immersive installations can exploit. Forbes describes "Innercity" as one of his most ambitious works, implying a scale and complexity that demands the intimate viewing experience a Tuscan hill town can provide—quite different from the metropolitan scale of his public monuments.

For Tuscany's cultural economy, the exhibition marks a modest but observable trend: the dispersal of serious contemporary art beyond Florence's Uffizi and Accademia orbit into the smaller towns that tourism boards have long packaged as heritage sites. Where San Gimignano was once marketed primarily for its towers and medieval character, Galleria Continua's programming has added a contemporary layer that appeals to international collectors and art-world travelers. This diversification of Tuscan cultural tourism—moving beyond the Renaissance postcard—has begun to reshape how foreign visitors and critics perceive the region's cultural offer.