Creator of the monumental sculpture Angel of the North (1992), the British installation artist Antony Gormley is probably best known for having pioneered the technique of using his own body as a living mould for life-sized figures in bronze and other metals. He was born in London, where he continues to live and work.Gormley was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Between 1971 and 1974 he travelled through the Middle East, studying Buddhist meditation in India and Sri Lanka. In 1974, he studied at the Central School of Art, London, going on to Goldsmith's School of Art (1975-77) and the Slade School (1977-79).
Gormley mounted his first one-person exhibition in 1981, at the Serpentine Gallery and the Whitechapel Gallery, London. His first one-person exhibition in the United States was at the Salvatore Ala Gallery, New York City, in 1984. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Prospect 86 exhibition, Frankfurt, in 1986.
In 1991, Gormley departed from his technique of using his own body as a mould for sculptures and displayed his first Field installation, consisting of 35,000 hand-sized terracotta figures made with a family of professional brickmakers, the Texca family, in Cholula, Mexico. Similar works include Field for the British Isles (1993), where thousands of crudely-shaped clay figures, grouped in a mass and all staring towards the viewer, were put together by a community of families in St Helens, Merseyside, under Gormley's direction. Looking at Field installations produces different emotions in the viewer, from affection to aversion, but most critics concede that these masses of odd little figures have a strange, even mesmerising power.
Gormley's most famous artwork, however, is probably the Angel of the North, an enormous sculpture standing on the site of an old coal mine, towering over the A1 road, near Gateshead, Tyne & Wear, England. The sculpture stands 65 feet high and has a Jumbo jet-sized wing span of 169 feet.
It is estimated that 90,000 vehicles pass the Angel of the North every day, and not a few stop for a closer look. It weighs approximately 100 tonnes and can be seen from miles away. Here, as in most Gormley artworks, the modelling was originally done directly from Gormley's own bodycast. This is Gormley's hallmark, and for him the use of the body has mystical overtones in all his work.
