Antony Gormley b. 1950

Antony Gormley is a sculptor best known for large-scale installations that explore the human body in space. Born in London, Gormley studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, before traveling to India and Sri Lanka for several years. After his travels, Gormley came back to London to study sculpture at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the Slade School of Art. Gormley’s early work, titled Field (1991), consisted of 35,000 small terracotta figures made by a Texca family of brick makers in Cholula, Mexico. Gormley has made several variations of the work, including Field of the British Isles (1993), for which he won the Turner Prize the following year.

He has made metal casts of his own body for several projects, including Another Place (1997), which spreads 100 cast-iron figures across a two-mile stretch of Crosby Beach in England. For Event Horizon, Gormley set casts of his body, 27 made of fiberglass and four made of iron, on the rooftops of buildings in London (2007) and New York (2010); in 2010, he set 100 cast-iron figures of his body throughout the Austrian Alps. Gormley’s work has been exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London, the British Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was made an Officer of the British Empire in 1997, and currently lives and works in London.

Related Categories: Contemporary Art, Sculpture