Antony Gormley

Meme CCCXXIX

2013

Antony Gormley was born and raised in Hampstead Garden Suburb, attending Ampleforth College, a Benedictine Boarding school in Yorkshire. Gormley went on to study Archaeology, Anthropology and History of Art at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1968-1971. From 1974, Gormley attended Saint Martin’s School of Art and Goldsmiths in London, going on to complete his studies with a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, where he graduated from in 1979. Gormley’s first solo exhibition took place at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981. The vast majority of Gormley’s work takes the human body as subject, recasting it from conceptions of the body as appearance-based object to a world of subjective experience in which we inhabit. The 2006 Sydney Biennale featured an installation of 180,000 small clay figurines, one of Gormley’s best known and acclaimed works entitled Asian Field. In 2006, the burning of Gormley’s 25-metre high The Waste Man formed the zenith of the Margate Exodus. In 2007, Gormley’s 31 life size, anatomically exact casts of his body were installed on top of prominent buildings along South Bank in London and Madison Square in New York. In 2009, Gormley invited members of the public to spend one hour on the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square in London as Part of a living art exhibition. In 2012, Gormley begun experimenting with digital cubism, and in 2015, five life sized sculptures were placed near the centre and at four compass points of the UK in a commission to celebrate the Landmark Trust’s 50th anniversary; Gormley named this collection Land. Gormley has received international recognition for his work, winning the Turner Prize in 1994, appointed a Royal Academician in 2003, made a trustee of the British Museum in 2007 and won the Laurance Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance for his set design for Babel at Sadler’s Wells. Gormley won the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for his services to the arts. Collectors of his work and Public Art locations include the Tate Gallery; Winchester Cathedral; Victoria Square, Birmingham; Mo i Rana, Noway; Crosby Beach; Greenwhich; Mansfield College; the British Library; Manchester Art Gallery; Lake Ballard, Australia; the Archaeological Park of Scolacium, Calabria; Hayward Gallery, London; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park; Christchurch, New Zealand and the Anchorage Museum, Alaska.