Sculptor / Artist
Professional
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Sir Antony Gormley's career began with a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981.
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 (1977 - 1979).
Art is not about understanding, it's about experience. Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive. Art has to change things and if it was immediately acceptable it would not be doing the job. I want to start where language ends.
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. He is renowned for works including Angel of the North in Gateshead which was commissioned in 1994 and erected in 1998, Iron Man (1993), Another Place (1997) and Event Horizon (2007).
I don’t have any choice over this. This is what I was born to do... or what I’ve found that I can do. The difficulty for me is just keeping up with the work, because the work is quite demanding. Listening to what the last work is trying to tell you what the next work should be. I’m just incredibly lucky to have the support of everyone who works with me and it’s never worked better. We’ve never had a better sense of common purpose.
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.
In 2017 the Royal Academy invited Gormley to consider the possibilities of virtual reality. In 2019 in collaboration with astronomer Priyamvada Natarajan he produced a VR experience called Lunatick which allows the viewer to seemingly travel through space to the Moon and fly over its surface.
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