Anthony Gormley

Sir Antony Mark David Gormley, OBE (born 30 August 1950) is a British sculptor His best known works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in Gateshead in the North of England, commissioned in 1994 and erected in February 1998, Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool, and Event Horizon, a multi-part site installation which premiered in London in 2007, aroundMadison Square in New York City, in 2010, in São Paulo, in 2012, and in Hong Kong in 2015-16.
The youngest of seven children born to a German mother and an Irish father. Gormley has stated that his parents chose his initials, “AMDG” to have the inference Ad maiorem Dei gloriam – “to the greater glory of God”. Gormley grew up in a Roman Catholic family living in Hampstead Garden Suburb. He attended Ampleforth College a Benedictine boarding school inYorkshire. before reading archaeology, anthropology and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1968 to 1971. He travelled to India and Sri Lanka to learn more about Buddhism between 1971 and 1974. After attending Saint Martin’s School of Art and Goldsmiths in London from 1974, he completed his studies with a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London, between 1977 and 1979.
While at the Slade, he met Vicken Parsons, who was to become his assistant and, in 1980, his wife, as well as a successful artist in her own right. Gormley said of her:
For the first 15 years she was my primary assistant. She did all of the body moulding… I think there are a lot of myths that art is made by, usually, lone men… I just feel so lucky and so blessed really, that I have such a strong supporter, and lover, and fellow artist.

Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 with Field for the British Isles. He was quoted as saying that he was “embarrassed and guilty to have won…In the moment of winning there is a sense the others have been diminished. I know artists who’ve been seriously knocked off their perches through disappointment.”
Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003, and was a Trustee of the British Museum from 2007-2015. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Institute of British Architects, honorary doctor of the universities of Teesside, Liverpool, University College London, and Cambridge, and a fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. In October 2010, he and 100 other leading artists signed an open letter to the Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt protesting against cutbacks in the arts.
On 13 March 2011, Gormley was awarded the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance for the set design for Babel (Words) at Sadler’s Wells in collaboration with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet. He was the recipient of the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and is the 2013 Praemium Imperiale laureate for sculpture. Gormley was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to the arts. Gormley’s website includes images of nearly all of his works up to 2012.

The most notable include:
• Bed (1981) – purchased by the Tate Gallery.
• Sound II (1986) – in the crypt of Winchester Cathedral, Winchester, Hampshire, England
• Field (1991; and subsequent recreations)
• Iron:Man (1993) – Victoria Square, Birmingham, England
• Havmann (1995) – Mo i Rana, Arctic Circle City, Norway
• Another Place (1997) – permanently installed at Crosby Beach near Liverpool, England
• Quantum Cloud (1999)– Greenwich, London, England
• Broken Column (1999–2003) – Stavanger, Norway
• Angel of the North (1998) – Low Fell (overlooking the A1 and A167 roads), Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, England
• Present Time (2001) – at Mansfield College, Oxford
• Planets (2002) – at the British Library, London.
• Filter (2002) – acquired by Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, England, in 2009
• Inside Australia (2003) permanent exhibition at Lake Ballard, Western Australia