At Nottingham Contemporary, the gym has entered the museum — but the weights have been replaced by fragments of art history. Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas has transformed two of the institution’s largest gallery spaces into something caught between an art school, a sculpture studio and a functioning fitness centre. Physical Culture, his first institutional solo exhibition in England, brings together steel exercise machines, easels and sculptural casts that reference everything from student studies to some of Western art’s most familiar ideals of physical perfection. Among them are replicas derived from Michelangelo’s David and the Apollo Belvedere, figures that have spent centuries functioning as models of the idealised male body. Here, however, their authority is subjected to a rather different form of pressure. They become weights.
