Antony Gormley U.K., b. 1950
"Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive - in the past that was mixed up with other illustrative duties but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern". - Antony Gormley
Antony Gormley's sculptures, installations, drawings, and public artworks seek to illustrate the human body's relation to space and time. Studying Buddhism in Sri Lanka and India between 1971 and 1974 inspired his tactile connection to conceptual questions. He often casts his own body as the starting point for his sculptural works, which go on to include cast iron, wire, shellac, or casein and shellac on paper.
The figure is often abstracted-be it simplified into a boxy, geometric tower that expands aggressively into space or a ghostly figure situated in the middle of a contained electron cloud, among other forms. His public sculptures are interactive and often provoke the viewer to question unexpected uses of space, from steel figures peering down at his viewer from a rooftop or a public sculpture created, one hour at a time, by the audience itself. Gormley believes in "corporeal potentiality," and his work highlights his viewer's human ability to occupy and destroy objects in space. His poignant sculptures unite an obtuse spiritual quality with reference to the historical and cultural specificity of the human figure.
Gormley has exhibited at institutions including Centrum Paul Klee, Bern, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Sao Paulo, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, MACRO, Rome, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Kunsthall Rotterdam, the Netherlands, ICA, Singapore, Guangdong Museum of Contemporary Art, China, Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, The British Museum, London, Tate St. Ives, United Kingdom, and Obala Art Center, Sarajevo, among many others. He has had a public sculpture at Madison Square Park in New York (2010) and the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London (2009), among others. Gormley also participated in the Venice Biennale in 1986 and 1982, The International Sculpture Biennale in 2010 and 2008, and the Gwangju Biennale in 2000 and 1995, among other international presentations. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, and official Knighthood for Services to the Arts in 2014.
