“We’re trying to use the entire volume of the Royal Academy in a way that really makes the viewer’s journey through it intriguing,” the artist explains. Gormley has compared the challenges of any particular site to the resistance of marble for the sculptor who carves. Over the past three years, work has been taking place to reinforce the galleries’ floors and walls in anticipation of his large-scale sculptures and installations every possibility has been probed, testing the building’s capabilities, as if the Main Galleries were one huge armature for a sculptural experiment. This is one in a long series of site visits to the RA.

Conversation shifts between the practical and the philosophical, which, in the making of Gormley’s art, are inextricable. Gormley checks in on his sculpture Cinch (2017), a stainless-steel-faceted body-form perched above the north entrance to Burlington Arcade, keeping a silent vigil over the daily routines of the street below. The days are beginning to lengthen and as the sun sets we admire the cityscape. And despite his access to extraordinary places, and his familiarity with subjects as diverse as Hindu sculpture and quantum physics, his curiosity remains unbounded. For all his global renown, the sculptor appreciates things that others might take for granted, like a well-maintained roof. The figures have since inhabited the skylines of Rotterdam, New York, São Paulo and Hong Kong. The 31 standing figures of Event Horizon, created for his last major exhibition in London in 2007, could be seen from the terrace of the Hayward Gallery atop different buildings as far as the eye could see. Gormley has stood on many rooftops scoping out sites for sculptures. We have been in the galleries plotting the positions of works, and now we are high above, scaling ladders and navigating tight walkways, in order to check the access to ceiling fixing points. It’s mid-April and, before the RA’s Summer Exhibition hang begins, Gormley and his assistant Ocean Mims have joined me and my RA colleagues to consider some of the logistics of installing his autumn exhibition, a project that, for the RA, is unprecedented in its complexity. The artist is on top of Burlington House, above the RA’s Main Galleries, looking down into its grand spaces through the skylights. “This is a very neat roof!” Antony Gormley exclaims.

Instaling Sea Horizon