Antony Mark David Gormley OBE (born 30 August 1950) is an English sculptor, best known as the creator of Angel of the North, a public sculpture in Gateshead.
Born the youngest of seven children Gormley grew up in a well off family in Hampstead. Gormley studied at Ampleforth College. He also studied at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1968 to 1971 before going to India and Sri Lanka to study Buddhism from 1971 to 1974. From 1974 onwards, he attended various colleges in London, completing his studies with a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade School of Art, University College London between 1977 and 1979. His career was given early support by Nicholas Serota who had been a near contemporary of Gormley's at Cambridge giving him a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981.
Almost all of his work takes the human body as its subject, with his own body used in many works as the basis for metal casts.
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 a thing but 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.
Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 with Field for the British Isles. He is currently a trustee of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.
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.
The burning of Gormley's 25-metre high "The Waste Man" will form the zenith of the 2006 Margate Exodus.
Major works
A figure from Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool.
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Iron: Man, in Victoria Square, Birmingham.
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Gormley's website lists over 500 works (the last from 2005). The most notable include:
- Field (and subsequent recreations).
- Sound II (1986) in the crypt of Winchester Cathedral.
- Iron: Man (1993) Victoria Square, Birmingham.
- Another Place (1997) currently at Crosby Beach near Liverpool.
- Quantum Cloud (1999) Greenwich, UK.
- Angel of the North (1998)
Proposals not taken forward
- The Brick Man, a proposal for the Holbeck Triangle, a disused patch of land bounded by three railway embankments just outside Leeds City station, was to be a circa 20 metre high representation of the human male form, made in brickwork. The proposal, circa 1980, was not favoured by the city, which refused planning permission.
