Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley (born August 30, 1950, London, England) British sculptor and draftsman best known for his work with human forms, which he created chiefly from casts of his own naked body. In these artworks he examined aspects of the human presence in the world, often employing more than one figure placed within a landscape or cityscape. In 1994 he won the Turner Prize for contemporary art for a group of figural installations created under his direction.

Gormley attended Trinity College, Cambridge (1968–71), taking a degree in art history, archaeology, and anthropology, and thereafter traveled in India and Sri Lanka for three years. Upon his return to London, he studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central Saint Martins), Goldsmiths College, and the Slade School of Fine Art. Struck by the manner in which people he had seen on his travels had created a private space in public places by covering themselves with a piece of cloth, he made his first plaster casts involving the human form. But the human form was only one of the subjects of his early work.

Increasingly, in the early 1980s Gormley was drawn to examine questions of humanity in relation to the environment. He made his first whole-body casts for Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage in 1981. As he continued, he varied materials and positions (crouching, standing, kneeling, lying down), sometimes distorting the human figure (as by elongating the arms) or replacing human features with other objects (as by putting a cast beam where the head should be). As gallery goers paused to examine the sculptures, they themselves seemed to be both the observers and the observed.

This sense was even more pronounced in the Field projects that won Gormley the Turner Prize. Each of the Field installations was composed of tens of thousands of small staring terra-cotta figures, which were packed into a gallery room facing the entrance at which the gallery goer stood. Who, the work seemed to say, was looking at whom? The figures themselves had been constructed under Gormley’s direction within a variety of communities throughout the world. They were displayed as Field for the British Isles (England), American Field (Mexico), European Field (Sweden), Amazonian Field (Brazil), and so on.

Gormley’s gift for the unsettling took another turn when he began to place his naked life-size figures out-of-doors. Natural environments enhanced the fragility of the human form and somehow changed the philosophical questions that Gormley’s works evoked. For Another Place (1997; at Crosby in Merseyside, England), for example, Gormley placed 100 cast-iron figures facing out to sea over a 2-mile (3.2-kilometre) stretch of beach. For 6 Times (2010; in Edinburgh), he placed six figures along the Water of Leith, four of them partly submerged in the water, one partly buried on land, and the sixth standing at the end of an old pier, facing the sea.

It was an unsettling sensation that New Yorkers experienced when Gormley’s Event Horizon was installed in Manhattan in 2010. That work consisted of 31 sculptures placed in the Flatiron district, some at ground level and others on rooftops and ledges in the vicinity of Madison Square Park. The figures above street grade caused the New York City Police Department to assure the public that the sculptures were not fellow humans about to jump.

Gormley continued to consider the human body through a variety of forms in the 2010s, often building on previous projects. Cubic figures became more prevalent, sometimes expanding or breaking apart, as in the exhibitions “Expansion Field” (2014) in Bern, Switzerland, and “Sum” (2018) at the Convent of St. Agnes, Prague, respectively. Late in the decade, he installed various sculptures (some of which he made 35 years apart) in such historic locations as the galleries of the Uffizi in Florence and on the island of Delos, Greece (both 2019). He was probably the first artist to exhibit new work in the latter location since the legendary island was inhabited by humans over 2,000 years ago. In 2020 Gormley installed Clearing, an iteration of an earlier installation comprising expansive coiled metal tubing, in Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York.

Until his controversial works of the 21st century, Gormley was perhaps best known for the enormous Angel of the North (1998; near Gateshead, England), some 65 feet (20 metres) high and having a 175-foot (54-metre) span. He was created an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1997 and was included in the New Year Honours List for 2014 as a knight bachelor. In addition, Gormley was made a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2003, and he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for sculpture in 2013.