Antony Gormley

Sir Antony Mark David Gormley (born 30 August 1950) is a British sculptor.

He attended Ampleforth College, a Benedictine boarding school in Yorkshire, before reading archaeology, anthropology, and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1968 to 1971.

He travelled to India and the Dominion of Ceylon / Sri Lanka to learn more about Buddhism between 1971 and 1974.

After attending Saint Martin's School of Art and Goldsmiths in London from 1974, he completed his studies with a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, between 1977 and 1979.

Gormley's career began with a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981.

Almost all his work takes the human body as its subject, with his own body used in many works as the basis for metal castings.

Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live."

Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or "the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside."

His work attempts to treat the body not as an object, but as a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings.

The work is not symbolic but indexical – a trace of a real event of a real body in time.

His works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in Gateshead in the north of England, commissioned in 1994 and erected in February 1998; Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool; and Event Horizon, a multipart site installation which premiered in London in 2007, then subsequently in Madison Square in New York City (2010), São Paulo, Brazil (2012), and Hong Kong (2015–16).

Gormley was born in Hampstead, London, the youngest of seven children, to a German mother (maiden name Brauninger) and a father of Irish descent.

His paternal grandfather was an Irish Catholic from Derry who settled in Walsall in Staffordshire.

The ancestral homeland of the Gormley Clan (Irish: Ó Goirmleadhaigh) in Ulster was east County Donegal and west County Tyrone, with most people in both Derry and Strabane being of County Donegal origin.

Gormley has stated that his parents chose his initials, "AMDG", to have the inference Ad maiorem Dei gloriam – "to the greater glory of God".

Gormley grew up in a Roman Catholic family living in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

The family was wealthy, with a cook and a chauffeur, with a home overlooking the golf course; Gormley's father was an art lover.

The 2006 Sydney Biennale featured Gormley's Asian Field, an installation of 180,000 small clay figurines crafted by 350 Chinese villagers in five days from 100 tons of red clay.

Use of others' works attracted minor comment.

Some figurines were stolen.

Also in 2006, the burning of Gormley's 25-m high The Waste Man formed the zenith of the Margate Exodus.

In 2007, Gormley's Event Horizon, consisting of 31 life-sized and anatomically correct casts of his body, four in cast iron and 27 in fiberglass, was installed on top of prominent buildings along London's South Bank, and installed in locations around New York City's Madison Square in 2010.

Gormley said of the New York site, "Within the condensed environment of Manhattan's topography, the level of tension between the palpable, the perceivable, and the imaginable is heightened because of the density and scale of the buildings" and that in this context, the project should "activate the skyline in order to encourage people to look around. In this process of looking and finding, or looking and seeking, one perhaps re-assess one's own position in the world and becomes aware of one's status of embedment."

Critic Howard Halle said that "Using distance and attendant shifts of scale within the very fabric of the city, [Event Horizon] creates a metaphor for urban life and all the contradictory associations – alienation, ambition, anonymity, fame – it entails."

In July 2009, Gormley presented One & Other, a Fourth Plinth commission, an invitation for members of the public, chosen by lot, to spend one hour on the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square in London.

This "living art" happening initially attracted much media attention.

It even became a topic of discussion on the long-running BBC radio drama series The Archers, where Gormley made an appearance as himself.

In 2012, Gormley began making sculptures that could be termed as "digital-cubism".

Through solid steel cubes, the human form is rendered into an array of different postures and poses, boldly standing in a white gallery space.

In March 2014, Gormley appeared in the BBC Four series What Do Artists Do All Day? in an episode that followed his team and him in their Kings Cross studio, preparing a new work – a group of 60 enormous steel figures – called Expansion Field.

The work was shown at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.

In May 2015 five life-sized sculptures, Land, were placed near the centre and at four compass points of the UK in a commission by the Landmark Trust to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

They are at Lowsonford (Warwickshire), Lundy (Bristol Channel), Saddell Bay (Scotland), the Martello Tower (Aldeburgh, Suffolk), and Clavell Tower (Kimmeridge Bay, Dorset).

The Dorset sculpture was knocked over into Kimmeridge Bay by a storm in September 2015.

On 6 September 2015, Another Place marked the 10th anniversary of its installation at Crosby Beach in Merseyside.

Gormley commented:

"I'm just delighted by the barnacles!

Every time I'm there, just like any other visitor, you're encouraged to linger a bit longer seeing the tide come in and how many of them disappear.

And then you're encouraged to linger further until they're revealed again." In September 2015, Gormley had his first sculpture installed in New Zealand. Stay is a group of identical cast-iron human form sculptures, with the first installed in the Avon River / Ōtākaro in Christchurch's central city, and the other sculpture installed in the nearby Arts Centre in early 2016.

Gormley is a patron of Paintings in Hospitals, a charity that provides art for health and social care in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.