Gallery IV

Antony Gormley RA, Quantum Void VI, 2009. 6mm square section mild steel bar Photo: John Bodkin This gallery is energised by the surprising number of sculptural works hung on its walls. The result is immensely stimulating. Antony Gormley’s dynamic exhibit is a figure, and yet it explodes outwards in a burst of thrusting diagonal rods. ‘Gormley responded to the 'making space' theme with a sculpture that comes right out into the room,’ says Ann Christopher, who hung this gallery. She then points up at Allen Jones’s floating dancer suspended above our heads.

Wherever we look, sculpture has been allowed to assert itself with invigorating freedom. One of Bill Woodrow’s works invades our space with branchlike forms that impale a book andmake its open pages bleed. One of David Nash’s vertical wall-pieces seems to have been sliced from top to bottom. And violence also erupts in Christopher’s own powerful sculpture, from which a spiky form suddenly shoots down and casts a dramatic shadow across a white board.

Christopher likes the silver-grey colour on the walls of this gallery, noting that it’s ‘luminous and quiet, and won’t interfere with the work’. It certainly suits everything here, from Tacita Dean’s potent Small Study for Monkey Puzzle II to Cornelia Parker’s redemptive Bullet Drawing, a delicate wire structure made from a real lead bullet. The grey also provides an excellent backdrop for Mick Moon’s subtle and beguiling Tree Line, with its echoes of landscapes produced a century ago by Gustav Klimt.

• Royal Academy of Arts