Antony Gormley's cardboard immersion transforms San Gimignano

Antony Gormley, known for monumental public sculptures including the Angel of the North in Gateshead and Event Horizon in New York, has created 'Innercity' at Galleria Continua in the Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano, according to Forbes. The work marks the first time the British artist has worked extensively with cardboard, a material choice that signals a deliberate shift toward impermanence and tactile engagement. The installation functions as one of his most immersive works to date, inviting visitors into a dialogue with the physical world rather than observing sculpture from a distance.

The choice of San Gimignano—a UNESCO World Heritage site whose medieval towers and narrow streets have become a staple of Tuscan tourism marketing—positions the work within a landscape shaped by centuries of human habitation and contemporary visitor pressure. Forbes reports that Gormley's exhibition, titled 'What Holds Us', uses cardboard as a material that speaks to impermanence and materiality, a conceptual departure from his signature cast-iron and bronze works. The installation invites audiences to experience art as a physical encounter rather than a visual spectacle, a framing that stands in deliberate contrast to the postcard consumption of Tuscan heritage that defines much tourism to the region.

San Gimignano has long occupied an ambiguous position in global tourism to Tuscany: celebrated as an exemplary medieval town, it has also become so saturated with visitors that the experience of walking its streets often resembles navigating a theme park rather than inhabiting a living community. Gormley's use of cardboard—a material that will degrade and require maintenance—introduces a temporal dimension that resists the frozen-in-time aesthetic that tourism marketing typically imposes on such sites. The work's immersive character demands physical presence and duration, qualities that tourism photography and digital circulation cannot easily capture, potentially reframing how visitors engage with the town itself.

The installation reflects a broader international interest in how contemporary art might reclaim heritage sites from the logic of mass tourism. By introducing an ephemeral, tactile work into a space defined by medieval stone and accumulated centuries of tourist footfall, Gormley's 'Innercity' stages a conversation between different temporalities—the permanent and the temporary, the monumental and the material, the curated heritage experience and the unscripted encounter. For Tuscany's cultural institutions, the work exemplifies how international artists continue to see the region not as a finished postcard but as a landscape where contemporary practice can generate new meanings.