Antony Gormley Biography and Interesting Facts
Sir Antony Mark David Gormley (born 30 August 1950) is a British sculptor. His 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 multipart site installation which premiered in London in 2007, then subsequently in Madison Square in New York City (2010), São Paulo, Brazil (2012), and Hong Kong (2015–16).
Early life
Gormley was born in London, the youngest of seven children, to a German mother and a father of Irish descent. His paternal grandfather was an Irish Catholic from Derry who settled in Walsall in Staffordshire. The ancestral homeland of the Gormley Clan (Irish: Ó Goirmleadhaigh) in Ulster was East Donegal and West Tyrone, with most people in both Derry and Strabane being of County Donegal origin. 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 in Yorkshire, before reading archaeology, anthropology, and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1968 to 1971. He travelled to India and the Dominion of Ceylon / 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, between 1977 and 1979.
Personal life
While at the Slade, Gormley 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.
The couple have a daughter and two sons.In June 2022 Gormley said that he had applied for German citizenship, to which he is entitled through his German mother, after describing Brexit as "a practical disaster" and a "betrayal". He expected to receive his new passport within the next month.
Career
Gormley's career began with a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981. Almost all his work takes the human body as its subject, with his own body used in many works as the basis for metal castings.
Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live." Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or "the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside." His work attempts to treat the body not as an object, but as a place and in making works ...
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