Artist of the day: Artist the Day, April 7, 2021: Antony Gormley, a British sculptor (#1251)

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Artist the Day, April 7, 2021: Antony Gormley, a British sculptor (#1251)

Sir Antony Mark David Gormley, OBE (1950), is a British sculptor. In 2008 The Daily Telegraph ranked Gormley number 4 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".

Gormley was the youngest of seven children born to a German mother and a father of Irish descent. Gormley grew up in a Roman Catholic family living in Hampstead Garden Suburb. 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.[1] 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, University College, London, between 1977 and 1979.

While at the Slade, he met Vicken Parsons, who was to become his assistant and, in 1980, his wife, as well as a successful artist in her own right. For the first 15 years she was my primary assistant. She did all of the body moulding... I think there are a lot of myths that art is made by, usually, lone men... I just feel so lucky and so blessed really, that I have such a strong supporter, and lover, and fellow artist.

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 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 an object 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 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.

In 2007, Gormley's Event Horizon, consisting of 31 life-size 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 that "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, 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.

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 which followed him and his team in their Kings Cross studio, preparing a new work – a group of 60 enormous steel figures – called Expansion Field.

In September 2015, Gormley had his first sculpture installed in New Zealand. Stay are identical cast iron human form sculptures, with the first installed in the Avon River in Christchurch's central city, and the other sculpture to be 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.

In 2017 Gormley curated Inside, an exhibition at the Southbank Centre, London, presented by Koestler Trust showing artworks by prisoners, detainees and ex-offenders. In addition he judged their annual category prize, also on the theme 'inside'.

In 2019 Gormley repopulated the island of Delos with iron 'bodyforms' with the unprecedented site-specific exhibition SIGHT. Organized and commissioned by NEON Organization and presented in collaboration with the Ephorate of Antiquities of Cyclades this project marked the first time that an artist took over the archaeological site of Delos since the island was inhabited over 5,000 years ago and is the first time a contemporary art installation has been unanimously approved by the Greek Archaeological Council of the Ministry of Culture to take place in Delos, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 with Field for the British Isles. He was quoted as saying that he was "embarrassed and guilty to have won...In the moment of winning there is a sense the others have been diminished. I know artists who've been seriously knocked off their perches through disappointment."

Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003, and was a Trustee of the British Museum from 2007 to 2015. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Institute of British Architects, honorary doctor of the universities of Teesside, Liverpool, University College London, and Cambridge, and a fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. In October 2010, he and 100 other leading artists signed an open letter to the Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt protesting against cutbacks in the arts.

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