Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley: A Body Cast Against the Sky

A winged figure stands at Low Fell outside Gateshead, overlooking the traffic on the A1 and the A167. It was commissioned in 1994 and erected in February 1998, and it has since become the piece of public sculpture that most people in Britain can name. Like nearly everything Antony Gormley has made in forty-five years, the *Angel of the North* began with the artist's own body — an instrument he has used, cast, sealed, multiplied and abandoned on beaches and rooftops ever since.

Hampstead, Ampleforth, India

Sir Antony Mark David Gormley was born on August 30, 1950, in Hampstead, London, the youngest of seven children of a German mother and a father of Irish descent. The household was wealthy and Roman Catholic, with a cook and a chauffeur, and his initials were chosen to spell AMDG — *ad maiorem Dei gloriam*, to the greater glory of God. He was sent to Ampleforth College, the Benedictine boarding school in Yorkshire, and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, where from 1968 to 1971 he read archaeology, anthropology and history of art.

Sleeping Place

He did not go straight to art school. Between 1971 and 1974 he travelled in India and Sri Lanka studying Buddhism, and returned with the beginning of everything he has done since. His first work, *Sleeping Place*, was a plaster-soaked sheet draped over a friend — a form he had seen in figures wrapped in saris and dhotis sleeping on Indian streets. Only then did he train, at Saint Martin's and Goldsmiths from 1974, and at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1977 to 1979. At the Slade he met the artist Vicken Parsons, who became his assistant and, in 1980, his wife; they have three children and live in a converted gasholder in King's Cross.

Lead, Then Iron

His Whitechapel Gallery debut in 1981 included *Natural Selection*, ten metres of everyday objects encased in lead. The lead body-cases of the 1980s — *Land Sea and Air II*, *Three Ways: Mould Hole and Passage* — were hollow, sealed containers made from his own form. The point was never resemblance. Gormley describes his practice as treating the body not as an object but as a place, and asks: "How to make bodies into vessels that both contain and occupy space?" The works are indexical rather than symbolic — a trace of a real event of a real body in time. By the 1990s the hollow forms had become solid cast iron, masses that displace space rather than enclose it.

The Field

Then he made something with no bodies in it at all. *Field for the British Isles* (1991) is a floor filled with small hand-made clay figures, all facing the viewer, and it won him the Turner Prize in 1994. He remade it as *Asian Field* for the 2006 Sydney Biennale with roughly 200,000 figurines, produced by about 300 Chinese villagers working through 100 tonnes of red clay in five days.

The Public Works

*Iron:Man* went up in Birmingham's Victoria Square in 1993. *Another Place* (1997) put a hundred cast-iron figures along Crosby Beach on Merseyside, facing the sea and submerging with the tide; it is now permanent. *Angel of the North* was commissioned in 1994 and erected in 1998. *Quantum Cloud* rose over the Thames at Greenwich in 1999. *Inside Australia* (2003) set figures across the salt pan of Lake Ballard in Western Australia. *Event Horizon* (2007) placed thirty-one life-size casts on the rooftops and pavements of London's South Bank, and later travelled to New York, São Paulo and Hong Kong; the critic Howard Halle called it "a metaphor for urban life and all the contradictory associations — alienation, ambition, anonymity, fame." *Blind Light* filled the Hayward Gallery the same year.

In 2009 he took the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square and gave it away. *One & Other* ran from July 6 to October 14, and put members of the public, chosen by lot, on the plinth for one hour each. In 2019 the Greek Archaeological Council unanimously approved *Sight* on Delos — the first contemporary art ever permitted on that World Heritage site.

The Establishment

He was elected a Royal Academician in 2003, made OBE in 1998 and knighted in 2014, and holds the South Bank Prize (1999), the Obayashi Prize (2012) and the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture (2013). He was a trustee of the British Museum from 2007 to 2015, filled thirteen galleries of the Royal Academy in 2019, and in 2023 became the first living artist invited to exhibit throughout the Musée Rodin. *A Case for an Angel I* sold at Christie's in 2017 for £5,296,250.

Why Antony Is Called a Genius

The claim is rarely made in those words. What the institutions say is narrower and better: the Royal Academy describes an artist whose subject is "the relationship of the human body to space," asking "fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos."

The originality is in the constraint. Gormley chose one instrument — a cast of a single, unremarkable body, usually his own — and has extracted from it, for four decades, an extraordinary range of meanings by changing only where it stands and what it stands among. On a rooftop it is a suicide, a sentinel and a stranger at once. In the tide at Crosby it is emigration and drowning. Above the A1 it is a region's argument for itself. The Cambridge training in archaeology is visible: he treats the human figure the way a field archaeologist treats a trace in the ground.

The counter-case is that the constraint is also a limit. Making one figure for forty years risks becoming a brand rather than an inquiry, and the multi-site rollouts of *Event Horizon* and *Field* can read as franchising. The work's meaning depends heavily on siting, and on the wall text explaining the siting; the object itself is often inert. He placed fourth in the *Telegraph*'s 2008 ranking of British culture's most powerful people, which measures reach, not depth. He is a superb sculptor with one very good idea, pursued with rare rigour. Genius is a bigger word than the evidence supports.

Legacy

Gormley put contemporary sculpture in front of people who had not asked for it — on a beach, on a motorway embankment, on a salt lake, on rooftops — and made them argue about it. The *Angel of the North* is now, for most of the country, what Gateshead means. That is a harder achievement than a gallery career.

Achievements

• Latin Grammy Award for Best MPB Album
• Knight Bachelor
• Notable work: Angel of the North
• Notable work: Event Horizon
• Notable work: Quantum Cloud
• Educated at Ampleforth College, Trinity College and Central Saint Martins
• Worked as sculptor, scenographer and photographer