Sleeping in a sculpture
In September hotel ‘The Beaumont’ opened in London, a hotel with the huge sculpture ROOM as façade. London has hereby gained a new public art object of the famous sculptor Antony Gormley. Gormley’s ROOM is both a monumental sculpture as an architectural extension of the hotel.
Sleeping in a sculpture: ROOM
Sleeping in a sculpture like the suite of ROOM must be quite an experience! The interior, which is a dark fumed oak-clad bedroom in a one-bedroom suite, accessed up seven steps through a black curtain from a strongly contrasting, pure white marble bathroom. Besides the ROOM the hotel has a total of 50 rooms and 23 suites. It’s the first hotel by Jeremy King and Chris Corbin, located in Mayfair. The hotel includes a couple of restaurants including ‘The Colony Grill Room’ and ‘The American Bar, a Gymnasium and a Spa.
Artist statement
“I take the body as our primary habitat. ROOM contrasts a visible exterior of a body formed from large rectangular masses with an inner experience. The interior of ROOM is only 4 metres square but 10 metres high: intimate at body level, but open above. The idea was to reveal this slowly. I wanted to structure night as a preamble to sleeping and dreaming, and re-enforce the feeling of being fully enclosed so the window only gives a view of the sky. At night, the shutters allow total enclosure and provide total black-out. The very subliminal levels of light allow me to sculpt darkness itself. My ambition for this work is that it should confront the monumental with the most, intimate experience.”
