Anthony Gormley
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Antony Mark David Gormley OBE RA (born 30 August 1950) is an English sculptor. His best known works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in the North of England, commissioned in 1995 and erected in February 1998, Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool, and Event Horizon, a multi-part site installation which premiered in London in 2007, and in 2010 around Madison Square in New York City.
When he was younger he was the youngest of seven children born to a German mother and an Irish father, Gormley grew up in a wealthy family living in Dewsbury Moor, West Yorkshire. 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 Sri Lanka to learn more about Buddhism between 1971 and 1974. Attending at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Goldsmiths in London from 1974, he completed his studies with a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade School of Art, University College London, between 1977 and 1979.
Gormley's 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 formetal 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 work is not symbolic but indexical — a trace of a real event of a real body in time....
When he was younger he was the youngest of seven children born to a German mother and an Irish father, Gormley grew up in a wealthy family living in Dewsbury Moor, West Yorkshire. 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 Sri Lanka to learn more about Buddhism between 1971 and 1974. Attending at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Goldsmiths in London from 1974, he completed his studies with a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade School of Art, University College London, between 1977 and 1979.
Gormley's 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 formetal 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 work is not symbolic but indexical — a trace of a real event of a real body in time....