HAPPY BIRTHDAY - ANTONY GORMLEY - 64 TODAY Sir Antony Mark David Gormley, OBE (born 30 August 1950) is a British sculptor. His best known works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in Gateshead in the North of England, commissioned in 1994 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, around Madison Square in New York City, in 2010 and in São Paulo, in 2012. The youngest of seven children born to a German mother and an Irish father, Gormley grew up in a wealthy Roman Catholic 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. After attending Saint Martins 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, between 1977 and 1979. Gormleys career began with a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981. 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. 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. The 2006 Sydney Biennale featured Gormleys Asian Field, an installation of 180,000 small clay figurines crafted by 350 Chinese villagers in five days from 100 tons of red clay.[citation needed] The appropriation of others works caused minor controversy and some of the figurines were stolen in protest.[citation needed] Also in 2006, the burning of Gormleys 25-metre high The Waste Man formed the zenith of the Margate Exodus. In 2007, Gormleys Event Horizon, consisting of 31 life-size and anatomically correct casts of his body, four in cast iron and 27 in fiberglass, was installed on top of prominent buildings along Londons South Bank, and installed in locations around New York Citys Madison Square in 2010. Gormley said of the New York site that Within the condensed environment of Manhattans topography, the level of tension between the palpable, the perceivable and the imaginable is heightened because of the density and scale of the buildings and that in this context, the project should activate the skyline in order to encourage people to look around. In this process of looking and finding, or looking and seeking, one perhaps re-assess ones own position in the world and becomes aware of ones status of embedment. Critic Howard Halle said that Using distance and attendant shifts of scale within the very fabric of the city, [Event Horizon] creates a metaphor for urban life and all the contradictory associations – alienation, ambition, anonymity, fame – it entails. In July 2009, Gormley presented One & Other, a Fourth Plinth commission, an invitation for members of the public, chosen by lot, to spend one hour on the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square in London. This living art happening initially attracted much media attention. It even became a topic of discussion on the long-running BBC radio drama series The Archers, with Gormley set to make an appearance as himself. In March 2014 Gormley appeared in the BBC Four series What Do Artists Do All Day? in an episode which followed him and his team in their Kings Cross studio, preparing a new work - a group of 60 enormous steel figures - called Tanker Field. The work is to be shown at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. 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 – its like being a Holocaust survivor. In the moment of winning there is a sense the others have been diminished. I know artists whove been seriously knocked off their perches through disappointment. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003 and a Trustee of the British Museum since 2007. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, honorary doctor of the universities of Teesside and Cambridge, and a fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. In October 2010, he and 100 other leading artists signed an open letter to the Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt protesting against cutbacks in the arts. On 13 March 2011, Gormley was awarded the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance for the set design for Babel (Words) at Sadlers Wells in collaboration with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet. He was the recipient of the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and is the 2013 Praemium Imperiale laureate for sculpture. Gormley was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to the art.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 12:16:34 +0000
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