Anthony Gormley is Britain’s most beloved sculptor and “public artist.” From a rather inauspicious artistic beginning following graduation (tellingly, Gormley originally studied archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge before going on to Goldsmiths and the Slade), in which he was paid to paint psychedelic and apocalyptic murals for nightclubs, Antony Gormley has always chosen projects that display public visibility and public relevance, or resonance, within a space.
Gormley is best known for his Angel of the North, a man-machine with vast wide wings embracing the sky, the hills of Tyne-and-Wear, and the A167 rumbling below. An installation on Crosby Beach in Liverpool, Another Place, featured a hundred figures – all of them casts of Gormley’s own body – standing at evenly spaced intervals across a 2 mile stretch, revealed and concealed in turn by the ebb and flow of the tide. The famous Field featured thirty-five thousand handmade clay figures – “hand-sized and easy to hold, with eyes deep and closed” as Gormley specified to the several generations of Mexican bricklayers and clay workers who created the piece – and won him the 1994 Turner Prize.
