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Antony Gormley Biography

London, 1950

Since the late 70s, established British artist Antony Gormley has been internationally recognized as having breathed new life into the use of the human form in sculpture. Often cast from his own body, Gormley's lead and iron figures embody an ongoing exploration of mental and physical sensation - of how it feels and what it means to be alive. His public sculptures have repeatedly explored the ways in which artistic images, socio-political issues and the natural environment collide and interact. In the late 90s these works were executed on an increasingly ambitious scale, culminating in his controversial, monumental masterpiece The Angel of the North, a huge figure installed in the landscape around Gateshead in the northeast of England.

Much of Gormley's art is based on his understanding of spiritual traditions. He works with archetypes, yet roots his work in subjective experience. What absorbs him above all is the way in which man contains, but is also contained by, infinite space. He is concerned with gravity and structure, but also with thought, belief and the unseen. This is illuminated by the fact that he refers to his sculptural figures as 'body cases', and sometimes lists 'air' as one of the media from which they are made: implying that their invisible interiors are as important as what we can observe from the outside. Thus the 'cases' are indexical signs - physical traces of some presence - rather than symbols; they refer to the real object that they once contained. It is undeniably the thrill of presence that we feel when confronted by Gormley's cast sculptures.

Gormley is an artist quite unafraid of explicit subjectivism, and is prepared to tackle grand, emotive themes such as life and death, fear and joy. The image of the solitary person is to be found in both his sculpture and in his works on paper, and the mood this figure conveys is generally contemplative or melancholic. In this respect, works such as Post and Total Strangers are symptomatic of the uncertainty and unease which are traditionally associated with fin de siecle culture. The body cases can appear at once comforting and confining, like tailored isolation chambers, suggesting both protection and imprisonment. That they are normally made of lead is significant, as this is a dense but malleable material that, while resistant to radiation, is also poisonous in its own right. But in spite of his fundamentally serious intent, some of Gormley's work does betray a sense of humor and a feeling for the absurd. Address is a body case for a man sticking his tongue out, while Tree boasts a bizarrely overstretched neck.

In addition to working with the body, Gormley has also investigated the properties and associations of objects by treating them in a similar way. Fruits of the Earth incorporates a revolver, a bottle of wine and a machete, each wrapped in layer upon layer of lead until their individual definition is all but lost. In Natural Selection, the objects used are more readily identifiable, and include a banana, a light bulb, a hand grenade and a baseball bat. Vehicle is a case for a glider with a fifteen-meter wingspan.

Field is a more recent piece located somewhere between figure and object. It is in fact a series of projects begun in 1993, involving the creation - with local help - of tens of thousands of rough terracotta figurines in various locations across Europe and America. As each figure is hand-sized and hand- made, their cumulative effect is both intimate and imposing. Field is a work about community and self-awareness, and about the relation between our own shape and the shapes of the things we make.

Gormley's 'Insider' series, produced over the last few years, signals a move inside the human body itself. He describes these etiolated figures as being 'to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is a core rather than a skeleton'. What these uncanny figures suggest is the amorphous psychological interior of an individual made solid. Yet like much of Gormley's work, they have a universal effect. As Gormley adds: 'Inside each of us is a self that we would maybe rather not recognize and [that] constitutes a kind of third man, the Insider as alien witness.'

Another of Gormley's recent sculptural projects is the 'Quantum Cloud' series. Hidden within intricate assemblages of steel tubes are the vague silhouettes of human figures, which seem to materialize and fade away without warning, as if cloaked in mist. These works, including a large-scale version created alongside the Millennium Dome in London, could be seen as marking a new phase in the artist's approach - characterized by the use of assembly in place of casting. But their essential subject remains the same; the body as an expressive container for a complex and shifting spirit.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

British Museum, London

Tate Gallery, London

The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, USA

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

White Cube, London, 2000

'Critical Mass', The Royal Academy, London, 1998

'Field for the British Isles', Hayward Gallery, London, touring exhibition, 1996

'American Field', Touring: Centro Cultural art Contemporaneo, Mexico City; San Diego Museum of

Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California, USA, 1992

Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1981

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

'Between Cinema and a Hard Place', Tate Modern, London, 2000

'Material Culture: The Object in British Art of the 1980s and 90s', Hayward Gallery, London, 1997

'Turner Prize Finalists', Tate Gallery, London, 1994

'Documenta 8', Kassel, Germany, 1987

'An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture', The Museum of Modern Art, New York,

1984 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Tromp, Ian; Ann Hindly, Quantum Clouds and Other Work, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, 2000

Gormley, Antony; Udo Kittelman; Ingrid Mehmel, Total Strangers, Edition Cantz, Cologne, 1999

Anderson, Gail-Nina; Neil Carstairs; Antony Gormley; Iain Sinclair, Making an Angel, Booth-Clibborn

Editions, London, 1998

Gombrich, EH; John Hutchinson, Antony Gormley, Phaidon, London, 1995

Morgan, Stuart, 'Antony Gormley, Whitechapel Gallery', Artforum, New York, Summer, 1981