Antony Gormley's work places human forms into eye-opening new contexts, asking us to reconsider our own place in the world. In his 2007/2010 piece "Event Horizon," he placed several dozen life-size casts of his own body on urban rooftops, where they looked out over streets and squares. Does the viewer imagine herself watched by these looming figures--or imagine being one of them? More recently, his cast iron figures have been disseminated over 150 square km in the mountain pastures of the Austrian Alps, all standing at exactly 2039 meters of altitude. "They are a mediation between the domestication of the valleys and the idea of the peak,” Gormley said of the project, codenamed "Horizon Field." Or take his work "One & Other," in which he curated members of the public to stand on an elevated plinth over Trafalgar Square in London for one hour at a time, creating a constantly changing celebration of humanity.
This spring, he collaborated with the choreographer Hofesh Shechter to create the powerful "Survivor," a piece with hundreds of dancers moving their own forms through space and time.
“In the high Alps of Vorarlberg, Gormley's sculptures will be subjected to the forces of nature. In winter some will be covered by snow. Humanity is humbled here, rendered powerless.” — Peter Aspden, Financial Times
[ted id=1551 width=560 height=315] Traditional Greek sculptors took a hunk of marble and, by chipping away at it, crafted the human form. Antony Gormley, the British sculptor who gave this thought-provoking talk at TEDGlobal 2012, takes a very different approach, creating works that explore the interior space we feel within our own bodies and the […]
Continue readingBorn in London in 1950, Antony Gormley is one of Britain’s most treasured artists. Winner of the Turner Prize, the South Bank Prize, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture, he is an OBE, an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an honorary doctor of the University of Cambridge and fellow of Trinity and […]
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