LONDON—London is having a sculpture moment. Kiefer’s tottering towers are still astonishing tweedy Friends of the Royal Academy up from the country. And Gagosian is offering a very rare sculpture treat, the sort that only a gallery with its reach and reputation could put on.

As with last summer’s magnificent show of Francis Bacon triptychs and the intervention by Damien Hirst, this exhibition is so superbly chosen and installed that a major museum should have put it on. So three cheers for Larry Gagosian and Stefan Ratibor, his London director, for giving us “Living, Looking, Making,” which gives something back to the art world that has given them so much.  

The show is a story about four modernist giants: Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti, Richard Serra, and Cy Twombly. The same exhibition mixes delicate pieces by Twombly, which transform found industrial objects into something sublime, cast in bronze and patinated; and the massive, brutal steel works of Serra. These four artists do not, it would be thought, share a common aesthetic.

Yet they live together harmoniously in the splendid Gagosian space. At the outside edge of the gallery, leaning against the walls is Serra’s Back to Back, one of several pieces from his Corner Prop series. Two huge steel girders are mounted diagonally against a wall in such a way that one just barely props up the other. The two parts of the sculpture hardly touch; go close to the point where the girders meet, and you’ll feel you might disturb the fulcrum and send them toppling down on you. Danger!

Surprisingly, the delicate, intimately scaled works by the other three artists—Giacometti’s Man with a Big Nose, Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale from his Natura series, which seems to shiver with movement, and the aforementioned Twombly pieces—more than hold their own in terms of impact with the monumental Serras. What these masterworks share—however delicate their construction and appearance—is a sense of unease and tension held in thrall. The show is on until May l9. Don’t miss it!

If you walk over the river on Waterloo Bridge toward the South Bank, you may feel that you are being watched. Well, you are—and not only by surveillance cameras. Look up, and you will see mute, watchful figures standing on the skyline. Over the next week, more and more of these eerie figures will appear, some 30 of them in all. This is sculptor Antony Gormley’s commissioned installation Event Horizon—part of the first big London exhibition “Blind Light” to be devoted to his work at the Hayward Gallery.

These bronze figures are casts of Gormley’s own body. They do nothing, other than stand, watching. He’s done this before and calls such simulacrum “corpographs.” Angel of the North is the most famous. The huge winged statue on top of a hill, visible as you drive along the trunk road to Newcastle, has been credited with almost super-human power in spurring on the regeneration of the previously depressed North East.  

Gormley's installation Another Place features figures looking out to sea from the Merseyside beach of Crosbie. Inside the Hayward itself (and opening May l7) are several huge sculptural installations, including a series of metal boxes in a fetal position. Blind Light is a transparent-sided box full of mist that seems to make anyone who steps inside it disappear. The artist’s grim installations and sculptures pose the question, Why should we be living this way? His contention, he has said, is that we should all be more in tune with our own internal space.

Also coming up on the London horizon is a show I am particularly interested in and, indeed, proud of. “Anticipation” showcases 26 of the city’s new young artists, and it is the result of two years’ curatorial work by Flora Fairbairn, Kay Saatchi, and Catriona Warren.

I say I am particularly proud of this show, because I have worked with all three and followed their careers closely. When I was editor of Art Review, Catriona edited the incredibly prescient Degree Show Guide, which discovered such artists as Idris Khan, Katy Moran, and Christian Ward, who have gone on to build important international careers.

I then commissioned Kay to write and photograph the first art travel pages published by any magazine. And Art Review always covered the shows curated by Flora, because she, too, has a magical eye for upcoming artists. She has recently done sell-out shows for Annie Kevans (there’s another one coming up), Rachel Kneebone, and Jason Shulman.

I also put Catriona and Kay together to trawl the degree shows for exciting new talent and put on a show entitled “MA/BA.” That exhibition never happened—it was scheduled for summer 2005, but lost its sponsor—yet “Anticipation” has developed out of it. It is very much the child of my heart and is now reality, thanks to property developer David Roberts, himself a noted collector of contemporary art, who offered to hold the show in One One One, his new 2,500-square-foot gallery in the West End.

So what are we going to see when “Anticipation” opens May 24? As the three curators have been telling me for the past year, students have returned to the concepts of beauty and skill. Judging by preview transparencies, the artist’s hand, once forgotten, is very much back on the young avant-garde agenda. Those in London at the end of May should not miss this overview from three of the city’s top “eyes” of the new horizon of the London art scene. All works are for sale (from about £500-£5,000) and l00 percent goes to these exciting young artists.