ANTONY GORMLEY

David Nicholson

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

When you first set eyes on Sir Antony Gormley’s most famous work, the giant Angel of the North sculpture set on a hill in the Northeast of England, you struggle to make sense of it.

Angel of the North, Antony Gormley.

Another Place, Antony Gormley

So vast that, if set on its side, it would be higher than the Statue of Liberty, with a ‘wingspan’ wider than a Boeing 747. It is England’s largest ever work of art. Yet it looks like a regular human being, with wings.

Every year, 33 million people take stock of this 200-tonne icon of iron, forged in a local factory and built on a disused coal mine. Drivers along the A1, one of Britain’s busiest motorways, get its full force, soaring above them as they head north. Train passengers are treated to its splendid sight as they speed along.

For Gormley, creating such a memorable, public piece of art was the fulfilment of many years’ work. Born in London to a wealthy Irish-German couple, the youngest of seven children, he showed early promise at Ampleforth, a Catholic boarding school in Yorkshire where he learnt carpentry and painted a mural after winning the school art prize. “That was a huge reinforcement. To make something that was part of the fabric of the building,” he remembers.

At Cambridge University, he studied archaeology, anthropology and history of art at Trinity College, where he painted several further murals, this time for money - commissioned by nightclubs, private parties and college balls. Flush with cash but determined not to sell out and get a proper job, Gormley fled to India and Sri Lanka to meditate, smoke dope and study Buddhism.

On his return, despite his parents’ opposition, he enrolled at art school in London - first at Central, then Goldsmiths and finally at the Slade. As the

Event Horizon

Angel of the North

Another Place

Antony Gormley at work in his studio Event Horizon

Another Place

1980s dawned, he was offered a show by Nick Serota at his Whitechapel Gallery. Here, Gormley’s focus on his own body took shape: his work ‘Three Ways’ were casts of him rolled into a ball, bent over, and lying down.

Serota and Gormley were well-matched. The gallery owner wanted to attract crowds and startle them with original, challenging work. The sculptor wanted to explore his creative impulses rather than be forced into a commercial corner. “Antony was self-consciously trying to make work that addressed issues he felt the public would wish to be engaged in, rather than appealing to a collector or the marketplace,” said Serota. “He was much more interested in showing in public galleries than in commercial galleries.”

For a few years, in the 1980s, this purity of purpose threatened to derail Gormley’s career, as he ran low on money and commissions. It was only when he invited visitors to his studio to form heads out of clay and give them features, that ‘Field’ - a collection of tens of thousands of heads - took shape.

A sculpture for The Derry City Walls by Antony Gormley. The sculpture represents the divisions from the civil war in Northern Ireland locally referred to as “The Troubles.” What I find interesting about this sculpture is the division is not between the people, but within the people themselves (May, 2021). Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

This overwhelming, astonishing work won Gormley the UK’s premier art award The Turner Prize in 1994 and cemented his reputation.

Spurred by the popular reaction to Field, he cast 100 iron versions of his own body in ‘Another Place’ (1997) and set them across three kilometres of beach in the Northwest of England. Like Angel of the North, this work shakes viewers’ preconceptions. The sculptures look human. Could there really be 100 naked men standing in the water at sunset? To find out, you have to get closer. But the tide is coming in and the water is freezing. Did one of them move?

‘Event Horizon’ takes the same idea and transplants it onto the top of high buildings, in London (2007) and New York (2010). This time, we’re still unsure whether the figures are real or fabricated. We’re also alarmed, in a new, chilling and dreadful way. Is the person we see at the edge of the building about to jump?

I saw some of these figures in London and, like many others, my first reaction was to call the police, or a mental health helpline. It was only after a few minutes studying the figure that I became convinced it wasn’t a real person. In New York City, the police department stood ready to calm passers-by.

This close attention is exactly what Gormley wants.

Field, Antony Gormley

How many artists can provoke that kind of emotional response? You feel a certain terror and sympathy, you feel compelled to act, then you look more closely and begin to appreciate the artistry that went into the work and the theatrical skill of placing it in this exact position.

Although he is a more than a decade older the Young British Artists (YBAs), with their shock tactics of pickled sharks (Damien Hirst), unmade beds (Tracey Emin) and casts of their own heads (Marc Quinn), they share a confessional style of art, laying bare their own lives and - frequently - their own bodies. Yet Gormley is less gimmicky than any of them, certainly less commercially driven than Hirst, more emotionally stable than Emin and less prone to stunts than Quinn, with his pop-up sculptures or his gold-plated figure of Kate Moss.

By contrast, Sir Antony Gormley is more of an establishment figure, one of only a handful of knighted contemporary British artists, alongside Peter Blake and Anish Kapoor. While his work startles the viewer, it never provokes nausea or revulsion. The Royal Academy welcomed him to its membership in 2003, feeling that 30 years of reliably mainstream work guaranteed that he wouldn’t embarrass the institution.

Ever since his great flowering period in the 1990s and 2000s, Gormley has been busier than ever, with large studios in London and the North of England exporting works currently on show in Florida, Hong Kong, Singapore, Norway and Germany, where he is feted as one of the world’s greatest sculptors, still at the height of his powers at the age of 72.

Like the Angel of the North, Gormley stands far above his contemporaries, an artist for the ages.