Gormley, Antony (1950-…), a British sculptor, created the United Kingdom’s largest statue. It is Angel of the North, a statue 65 feet (20 meters) high, with a wingspan of 170 feet (52 meters). It was erected on a hilltop site in Gateshead, in northern England, and unveiled in February 1998. The statue weighs about 225 tons (205 metric tons) and is based on massive concrete piles 72 feet (22 meters) deep that anchor it to solid rock. The work was commissioned by Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council. It occupies a commanding position overlooking the main London to Edinburgh road, and vehicles traveling on this road have a clear view of the statue. The council has described the sculpture as “a messenger for the great engineering skills of the region and the spirit of its people, expressing a time of transition from the industrial to the information age.”
Gormley is a member of the New British Sculpture movement, a loosely connected group of British sculptors who came to prominence in the 1980’s. The New British Sculpture is mostly abstract and uses industrial and junk materials. Gormley’s work has concentrated on the portrayal of the human figure, mainly using strong industrial materials, such as lead, cast iron, steel, and concrete. He has become well known for his life-sized lead-encased fiberglass sculptures of the human body, often casting from his own body, in such works as Close (1993) and Learning to Think (1991). His Testing a World View (1993) is a collection of five identical cast iron human forms, each bending at the waist, arranged in different positions for each exhibition space. Field (begun in 1989) is a series of installations, each consisting of approximately 40,000 tiny figures. The figures are each the size of a human hand and made of terra cotta, and were created in partnership with local communities in Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, and St. Helens, in northwest England. Gormley exhibited the installations in different versions in the United Kingdom and worldwide.
In later work, Gormley has concentrated on large-scale works, such as Critical Mass (1995), which consists of 60 body-forms in 12 different positions made for the Remise, an old tram store in Vienna. Allotment consists of 300 cast concrete “rooms”, made for the Malmo Konsthalle, an art museum in Malmo, Sweden (1996). In 1997, Gormley created Another Place, 100 body-forms in 17 positions, for the Wattenmeer, at the mouth of the Elbe River in Cuxhaven, Germany.
Much of Gormley’s work has been site-specific, designed for large public spaces where the landscape around the sculpture plays an important part. An example is Havmann, his 33-foot (10-meter)-high figure made of Arctic granite, which was installed on the sea bed of a fiord at Mo i Rana, Norway, in 1995 and a sculpture for the walls of the city of Londonderry (Derry) in Northern Ireland (1987). His work has also been featured in exhibitions throughout the world. He participated in the 1981 and 1986 Venice Biennales; in 1994, he won the prestigious Turner Prize in the United Kingdom, and in 1998 he became a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Anthony Mark David Gormley was born on August 30, 1950, in London. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge University, and later at the Central School of Art, Goldsmith’s College and the Slade School of Fine Art, all in London.
