Gormley Sublimate

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.

Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

Find fine art prints for sale on 1stDibs today.