The Angel of the North - definition of The Angel of the North by The Free Dictionary The Angel of the North - definition of The Angel of the North by The Free Dictionary (redirected from The Angel of the North) Also found in: Wikipedia . Angel of the North n 1. (Named Buildings) a steel sculpture of an angel with outstretched wings, created in 1998 by British sculptor Antony Gormley, which stands on a hilltop outside Gateshead, NE England. It stands 20 m (85 ft) high and has a wingspan of 54 m (175 ft) 2. (Architecture) a steel sculpture of an angel with outstretched wings, created in 1998 by British sculptor Antony Gormley, which stands on a hilltop outside Gateshead, NE England. It stands 20 m (85 ft) high and has a wingspan of 54 m (175 ft) Acclaimed British sculptor Antony Gormley at the Royal Ontario Museum on Wednesday!

- Canadian Architect Canadian Architect The National Review of Design and Practice The Official Magazine of the RAIC Acclaimed British sculptor Antony Gormley at the Royal Ontario Museum on Wednesday! November 19, 2013 November 19, 2013 by Canadian Architect ROM Contemporary Culture presents the eighth annual Eva Holtby Lecture on November 20, 2013, moderated by art critic and journalist Sarah Milroy, former editor of Canadian Art magazine, and contributor for The Globe and Mail. In his lecture entitled “Art as Survival”, London-born sculptor Antony Gormley will explore the central theme of art and creativity in human life. Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public art works, including the Angel of the North – that investigate the relationship between the human body and space. The artist will look at his own work and historical objects in consideration of art as a tool for survival in a time of global climate change. UK artist Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950.

He has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human being stands in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually strives to identify the space of art as a space of becoming; in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. Gormley has had a number of solo shows at venues including the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; State Hermitage Museum St. Petersburg; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Hayward Gallery, London; Malmö Konsthall; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen. Major public works include Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England) and Exposure (Lelystad, The Netherlands). He has also participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta 8 in Kassel Germany. Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 and was made an Officer of the British Empire in 1997.

Since 2003 he has been a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and since 2007 a British Museum Trustee. The Eva Holtby lecture presented by Antony Gormley at the ROM takes place in conjunction with Cape Farewell’s Carbon 14: Climate is Culture Exhibition + Festival, a four-month program of satellite events, including music, performing arts, talks and special events. In 2005, Gormley accompanied Cape Farewell on its third arctic fieldwork expedition to Tempelfjorden, just north of the 79th parallel. Tickets for the Eva Holtby Lecture on Contemporary Culture are now on sale and priced at $28 for general admission, $25 for members, and $20 for students, and can be purchased online at or by calling 416.586.8000. This Eva Holtby Lecture is supported through the generosity of the Holtby Family. An annual ROM program highlight, the Eva Holtby Lecture on Contemporary Culture brings powerful voices to the Museum to discuss provocative and engaging contemporary ideas.

The Eva Holtby Lecture has grown to become a highly anticipated early event, focusing on relevant cultural issues of international scope and attracting the world’s most fascinating speakers. ROM Contemporary Culture Carbon 14: Climate is Culture continues on ROM Contemporary Culture’s 2013/14 theme of Climate Change (#ROMClimate). ROM Contemporary Culture has partnered with ROM Biodiversity to encourage conversation and provide insight on this contemporary issue. For more information, please visit . antony gormley's "domain field" (2003) 4.76-mm square-section stainless steel bar. various sizes: 287 elements, derived from moulds of local inhabitants of newcastle-gateshead aged 2.5 to 84 years. installation view, commission for BALTIC centre for contemporary art, gateshead, UK. photograph by jerry hardman-jones, leeds the artist. Canadian Architect Canadian Architect is a magazine for architects and related professionals practicing in Canada. Canada's only monthly design publication, Canadian Architect has been in continuous publication since 1955.

Anthony Gormley: The model sculptor - and angel of modern British art | The Independent Saturday 22 February 2003 00:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online At first the fog blew like ribbons of smoke across the road. Then, all at once, it rushed towards the car and enveloped it. The last two hours of the journey through the Dorset countryside became a slow crawl. It was night by the time I arrived on the isthmus that is the Isle of Portland. I felt dislocated and had no inkling of what the dawn might bring. What the next day brought was my first contact with the work of Antony Gormley. It was almost a decade ago and the place was the Portland Sculpture Trust, a wild landscape of rough grassland scarred by disused quarries from which, over many centuries, the fine creamy limestone was hewn by hand to grace great buildings such as Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace. And there, in the midst of the wild wasteland, suspended half-way up a sheer rock face in one quarry was a bas-relief of the figure of a man diving precipitously from the heavens.

It was an early work, from 1983, but already the qualities were there that have gone on to make Gormley one of the most distinctive and best-loved sculptors of public art in Britain. Still Falling, he called it, and there was something magical and mystical about it – a figure plunging vertically with tremendous velocity, and yet frozen for ever, never to reach the dull earth. One arm stretched behind might perhaps be the wing of an angel, I thought fancifully. When Gormley some years later erected the work that made his name, The Angel of the North, on a windswept mound near Gateshead, I thought back to the falling figure and wondered if that initial thought had been quite so capricious. The Angel – which began controversially with churlish protests that the money would have been better spent on local hospitals – has since been taken to their hearts by local people. Indeed, it has won wider affection to the point where it is probably the most celebrated modern work of public art in the country.

Schoolchildren relish it in catalogues of facts that relate how this most viewed sculpture in Britain is the height of four double-decker buses and has a wingspan as long as a jumbo jet. Local walkers pause to admire its tense torso glinting like burnished gold in the early morning sun. Football fans have bedecked it in Newcastle colours; indeed the moment that we knew Gormley had become a real celebrity was when, along with Newcastle's England striker Alan Shearer, he was asked to autograph the giant shirt so it could be auctioned for charity. No wonder there was such a fuss this week when Gormley unveiled his latest project – to make casts of 240 local people for a massive new work commissioned by the Baltic art centre on the Gateshead banks of the Tyne. If Britain had an artist laureate, Gormley would be a cinch, one critic said recently. It was rather a backhanded compliment. Not everyone in the art establishment is keen on Gormley. Traditionalists such as the Evening Standard critic Brian Sewell disdain him for the androgynous anonymity of his figures; the angel, he said, is vulgar, and Gormley "has absolutely no artistic merit".

From the other end of the critical spectrum, Jonathan Jones of The Guardian condemns Gormley as "a figurative artist: a very conservative, timid, unprovocative one, but dressed up in theoretical contemporary language". When the British Museum last year staged an exhibition of Gormley's drawings – and the catalogue revealed that he had experimented with the viscosity of different materials and so had drawn with linseed oil, methylated spirits, paraffin, coffee, blood and semen – Jones concluded: "Now we know the worst. Antony Gormley can wank on a piece of paper and get it exhibited at the British Museum". Yet this is not how the majority of the population feel. To a public weary of Mad Tracey from Margate for ever airing her dirty laundry in public, and that regards Damien Hirst chiefly as a purveyor of dead sheep and sharks, there is something about Gormley that makes him a worthy successor to Henry Moore as a prodigious creator of sculptures both provocative and distinctively his own. It was not always so. Gormley had first begun to be talked about in the art world in 1981, when Jay Jopling's White Cube gallery staged his first show.

But he first came to the attention of the wider public with his work Field, a piece in which a huge room was packed with more than 40,000 tiny terracotta figures. It won him the Turner prize in 1994, but it also brought criticism from some quarters of the type that had been levelled at Carl Andre's bricks at the Tate 20 years earlier. However, there was something about the bewitching army of little figures, with their haunting gouged-out eyes, that caught the general imagination, perhaps, some mused, because they prompted a range of associations, – like the suggestion that they stirred memories of the ancient Chinese soldiers guarding their Emperor's grave. But it was not the Turner prize, or the South Bank Award five year later, that provided the significant gear shift. It was getting art out of the gallery – and The Angel alongside the A1 and the east coast main line – that did that. He turned down the opportunity at first, after a disappointing experience in 1988 when Gormley had been asked to design a figure for a triangle of disused land near Leeds station.

He proposed Brick Man, a mummy-like giant, 120ft tall, which was well-received at first, until public opposition rose and the local planning committee rejected it as "unsuitable". But thanks to the persistence of more far-sighted councillors in the North-east, he was prevailed upon to change his mind. The result prompted the artist to say later: "The art of our time has failed us if it has to rely on the special conditions of the museum, of the private collection, of the commercial gallery." Nor, he added, was that failure good for the culture that surrounds the traditional venues for art. Gormley works now stand in dozens of public spaces from Winchester Cathedral to a Birmingham piazza, not to mention similar sites in Germany, France, Portugal, Norway, Korea and Japan. Part of Gormley's success springs, no doubt, from his ability and enthusiasm to talk about his work. He is far from immune from lapses into art-speak: "Sculpture is the place in which the ephemeral and lucid nature of human experience can be inscribed in geological terms. Everything is mobile and everything is an image." But he also talks around his art in ways that assist ordinary people to understand it.

His angel, with its man's trunk and machine's wings, asks, he says: "To what degree has humankind assumed powers that were once divine? It asks: is technology an aid, or a handicap? Has the way we have extended our bodies via technology to an extent imprisoned them? Look at the wings. They are an aspiration to fly, but they are also the rack on which the body is torn or held. Their top line is pure horizontal, as is the horizon, echoing the limit to man's perception." There is something else attractive about him. He combines what one commentator called "twin boyish traits – a genuine zeal for making the world a better place, coupled with a secret love of the 'wizard wheeze'." There was a good instance of that in 1998, the same year The Angel was hoisted into position, with his piece Critical Mass at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly. There 60 cast-iron figures, some tightly curled up, some prostrate, were strewn around the courtyard or suspended from Burlington House like the aftermath of some appalling occurrence. Gormley delighted in it on several levels.

There was a schoolboy relish in dangling things from the Academy's celebrated neo-classical façade. There was a mischievous adolescent thumbing his nose at the myopic net-curtain self-contentment of an art establishment "still running on 18th-century principles". And there was a political protest about Britain being the second biggest arms dealer in a world littered with corpses, from Bosnia and East Timor to Rwanda and Iraq. But undoubtedly Jonathan Jones is right when he says that it is Gormley's figurative style that makes him so generally accessible. Almost all his work is based on a casting or modelling of his own body that goes back to a childhood in which most of his Sundays were spent in the National Gallery or the British Museum, where he became particularly fond of a tufty-haired Egyptian mummy named Ginger, the 6,000-year-old occupant of Room 64. There was something else. Gormley was brought up in Hampstead Garden Suburb, in north London, one of seven children in a family so devoutly Catholic they used to kneel in the dark together each evening to pray.

Although, after his schooling at the Benedictine boarding school Ampleforth, he lapsed from his faith, there remained something sacramental about his understanding of the human body. After university at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read archaeology, anthropology and the history of art, he set off on the hippy trail to India, to learn meditation with a Burmese guru called SN Goenka. All these influences have converged in his art. He has rejected the crucifixion that is the central image of his childhood faith. But he has held on to the notion of a body given for others and tempered it with the Buddhist sense of present awareness. To him his body is not a focus for narcissistic self-portraits. It is a tool to produce images that stand for universal humanity. "My appearance belongs to others," he has said "not to me. It is an example of the universal human condition of embodiment." There were those, despite that, who accused him of "me, me, me" self-obsession. Which is what makes his latest venture such a new departure. He is turning to the use of other people's bodies.

"It's a big shift in my work," he says, "trying to create a collective body, if you like, to represent the community." It will be fascinating to see how it turns out. Llife story Lynn Barber meets sculptor Antony Gormley | Art and design | The Guardian Close This article is 8 years old I'm staring hard at the back of Antony Gormley's balls and wondering why he doesn't have more of a cleft in his buttocks while he expatiates on his new technique for 'drawing' bodies. Instead of making a mould of his body and casting it in solid iron, as he did for, say, Event Horizon (the figures on rooftops round London last summer), he is now covering the mould with a sort of metal mesh which retains the body shape when the mould is extracted, but in a lighter, airier, see-through form. We are looking at a mould of his body from the back, which gives me ample time to study his buttocks while he holds forth about duodecahedrons and the 'bubble matrix' on which his metal mesh is based.

There is no hope at all of my understanding the scientific theory he is talking about, but on the other hand, there is no hope at all of my stopping him, so buttocks it is. We are all pretty familiar with Antony Gormley's body by now, what with his fondness for scattering it round the country, and a very fine body it is too - well over six foot tall, thin, athletic, well-proportioned, altogether in good nick for someone of 57. But his face is more doubtful. He has a strange habit of peering at you from behind thick spectacles, as if you were a bug on a leaf. Moreover, he gets a bit too close for comfort, so that he is literally 'imposing' to a degree that seems odd in someone whose work is all about bodies and their space and place in the world. Once or twice, when I am sitting on a sofa and he is leaning right over me, I want to say: 'Back off.' We meet at his wildly glamorous studio, designed by David Chipperfield, behind London's King's Cross.

When the gate slides open, you see a yard full of rust-streaked bodies - Gormley's again - lying on pallets like stretcher cases on a battlefield. Straight ahead is the great sculpture studio rising the whole height of the building with offices and smaller studios on either side. Gormley comes lolloping out and walks me round the bodies; the prone ones are new and waiting to be shipped to the White Cube gallery for his latest show, but there are also four standing figures left over from last year's Hayward retrospective. They look the same to me, but he says they're different: 'I've got a bit fatter. And I'm certainly a bit more stooped and decrepit. All 32 of these new ones were cast in two days and I did six different poses, so I got really knackered.' He takes me up to his drawing studio to talk, which is quiet after the teeming bustle of the sculpture studio. Maddeningly, he says he doesn't want to talk about his own work (he will, of course) but about a book, Images of Change, for which he has written the introduction.

It is an English Heritage production, but an unusual one in that it is all about motorways, mobile phone masts, container depots, multistorey car parks, all the stuff that heritage enthusiasts generally dismiss as eyesores. But Gormley is made of sterner stuff and raves at length about the brutal beauty of the M1, the Daventry national freight terminal, the Rugby radio masts. 'I want people to be excited about cooling towers and megasheds; they're as much part of our history as the rural barn.' There is much more in this vein and he is dauntingly articulate. I can see why he is so firmly embedded in the arts establishment: he was on the Arts Council for three years, was a trustee of the Baltic, is a trustee of the British Museum, an OBE, a Royal Academician, an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, etc. 'I went to public school!' he says with a laugh. 'I'm trained to be a pillar of various sorts.' I say I was surprised that he was only an OBE, but he says reprovingly: 'I thought it was a very generous act of recognition.

I probably didn't deserve it when I got it and I maybe still don't.' But, given his patrician background, it is perhaps surprising that his work is aimed so firmly at the general public and not at the art elite. This means he has never been a great hit with collectors and he says ruefully: 'I'm one of the old pre-Damien farts who has not mastered the fine art of business. So I've ended up with an awful lot of work that is unsaleable, that cost a fortune to make but is actually useless. 'I mean, 300 lumps of concrete weighing 120 tonnes [presumably he means Allotment] needing 5,000 sq ft to show - what museum is going to want to deal with that? I've had it for 12 years and it's cost me more to store than it cost to make.

So that's what I'm doing now - looking for 40,000 sq ft of barns.' But he did cast a duplicate set of the 100 figures used for Another Place (on Crosby Beach, Liverpool) which are now being sold as single works around the world at £100,000 to £200,000 each, so they should pay the bills for a while. Would he have been so keen to reproduce his own body if he'd been short and potbellied? 'I guess you have to work with what you're given and it's probably not a bad thing in terms of certain kinds of scale and proportion that I've got a tall, skinny body. I'm accused by women critics of being whatever it is.' Vain? 'No - I was thinking more of being all male and standing erect. [Oh, phallic!] But I always say that I didn't choose to be a man and, had I been a woman, I would have been able to do the same thing in a different way.' But why doesn't he use models? 'I've said this again and again - I think there's no point in making another body when I have one already.

I want the most direct translation from living to art. And this is the one bit of the material world that I am actually inside and that I am able to work on from the other side of appearance.' And in any case, he says, he likes the process of bodycasting, having his body covered in Vaseline and wrapped in clingfilm, being swaddled in plaster-soaked bandages with just a breathing hole for his nose and waiting an hour or an hour and a half for the plaster to dry. He can't really enjoy it, can he? 'Oh god, yes, I do.' Isn't that rather kinky? 'I'm very kinky, oh yes! You go through that strait gate and you find that it's an extraordinary kind of freedom. I know it sounds trite, but it's true, that if you give away your freedom of choice, of which freedom of movement is the most powerful, your mind goes somewhere else. It's very like meditation.' It all started, he says, because he suffered terrible claustrophobia as a child, hated being enclosed even in a car and taught himself to conquer his fear.

'I started training myself by going backwards in my bed, forcing myself between quite tightly hospital-cornered bedclothes in the dormitory and lying with my feet on the pillow and my head down the bottom and saying to myself I must not panic. 'And that links to another experience of enforced sleep probably from the age of three to 10 or 12, being sent upstairs to have a rest. But I was never tired enough to sleep, so I would lie there and tell myself I couldn't move. And it was mixed with a certain kind of fear - somebody's coming and if I move they're going to kill me, so I'm not going to move, I'm not going to move, I'm not going to move. 'It was that experience of lying there totally awake but with my eyes shut and feeling this incredible claustrophobia of being enclosed within, as it were, the darkness of your body, and then just dwelling in it and feeling it slowly fade until you're floating in this infinite space.

So this idea of the interface between total bodily constriction and mental release was something that I think I had very strongly as a child.' This takes me right back to my years interviewing rubber fetishists for Penthouse days and I find myself breezily asking whether he likes wearing diving suits. Far from being annoyed, he says yes, he does, and fetches a diving magazine from a shelf and starts flicking through, showing me photographs of cave divers in the Yucatan. So, since he seems quite comfortable in this vein, I ask whether the pleasure he gets from body casting is more masochistic or sadistic? 'I think it's got a lot of Sacher-Masoch in it, although I don't get sexually excited doing it. There were two very early casts that have erect penises.' But how could he hold an erection long enough for the plaster to dry? 'I think we did the penis separately, in the manner of the Plaster Casters of yore [they were Sixties groupies who made plaster casts of rock stars' penises]. Yeah, I think there must be a bit of both sadism and masochism in what I do, even though I sort of think it's the thing that keeps me balanced.

I don't think that I'm dangerously perverse!' he says with a laugh. Does he remember the first time he cast his body? 'Oh God yes, I do. All the bad things happened, all my pubic hairs got stuck in the plaster. I'd used vast amounts of Vaseline, but even the biggest amount is not enough. And it was a very crunched-up pose. No, it was terrible, terrible. That was in 1980 or 1981. I'd made these two works, one called Bed, where I ate my own body in Mother's Pride, and one called Room, which was my clothes made into an enclosure, and I thought, "Well, the next step is to work with my own body directly." I didn't ever think that I'd still be doing it 28 years later!' For 12 years, his wife, painter Vicken Parsons, used to be his bodycaster, though now he has two assistants to do it. Did he ever cast her? 'Yes, once. It was really sweet of her to do it and it was as if she wanted to understand what she was doing for me.' Did she like it?

'No, she hated it.' And said never again? 'No, I said, "Never again", because I did n't like it.' Nor, he says, has he ever cast his three children - he carved sculptures of them when they were small (they are now grown-up) but: 'I didn't submit them to actual casting; that would be an act of terrible abuse. Because even if I were to ask them and they were to agree, I think it would be exploiting them.' But hang on - he asked loads of people to submit to casting for his Baltic show, Domain Field, in 2003 and that included children. 'Yes, but I think that was a sort of free choice. They were not artists who were obsessed with making bodycasts.' Strange. He has talked vaguely of abuse in his childhood; he was the youngest of seven children in a devoutly Catholic family where religion, he once said, was 'used as a tool of emotional abuse'. His parents - mother as much as father - believed in corporal punishment and the family was organised in an extremely disciplined way.

They lived in a house his father built in Hampstead Garden Suburb (his father was a pharmaceuticals magnate), with a chauffeur and maids and Gormley followed his four older brothers to Ampleforth, the Benedictine public school in Yorkshire. Three or four of his siblings are still practising Catholics, but he lost his faith when he left school. The monks of Ampleforth gave him every encouragement to become an artist; they allowed him to paint a mural on a corridor wall when he was just 13 and bought eight of his paintings when he left. (He has since given them a sculpture in return.) But his parents wouldn't let him go to art school because: 'Art wasn't on the list of accepted callings. Bank manager, priest, anything other than an artist, would have been more acceptable. They thought being an artist was pretentious maybe or not realistic enough. The most important thing was that you had to have a job and not be a burden either on your parents or the state.' So he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read archaeology and history of art, where he made friends with, among others, Nicholas Serota who later gave him his first major show at the Whitechapel Gallery.

He earned money by painting murals for the college balls and saved up enough to go travelling to India and the Far East and stayed away for two years. Eventually, he came back and got a grant from the then Greater London Council to go to art school. 'They interviewed me, looked at my drawings and reckoned I was worth paying for, which was fantastic.' I ask if he still has the drawings that so impressed the GLC and he digs around in an old plan chest and produces a portfolio of wonderful drawings from his travels - people, architecture, temple carvings, birds, rabbits - all showing enormous skill. It seems a pity that he doesn't draw any more, but he never does: 'I'm bored with it.' He trained at Central, Goldsmiths and the Slade, where he met his wife. His first sculpture was carving, but in 1980 he made the two seminal works, Mother's Pride and Room, which led to his interest in bodycasting. Throughout the Eighties, he worked mainly on figurative sculpture and often in lead (he shows me an exquisite lead sculpture of his daughter Paloma as a newborn baby), but gave up when he found he was beginning to suffer from lead poisoning.

He was also depressed, working in a cold studio in Peckham, south London, and rarely selling anything. Things cheered up in the Nineties when he signed with Jay Jopling of White Cube, abandoned lead and started working on more collaborative projects. It was one of these - Field - a group of 40,000 tiny terracotta figures that won him the 1994 Turner Prize. And then in 1998, The Angel of the North was unveiled and made him, almost overnight, the most popular sculptor in the country. It is hard to find anyone who doesn't love The Angel, though I prefer Another Place, his 100 figures looking out to sea from Crosby Beach, Liverpool. But now his work is undergoing another seismic shift in that he is moving from casting to 'drawing' bodies in the air. He has applied to erect a 50 metre-high sculpture of a man standing in the River Liffey in Dublin, two-and-a-half times as tall as The Angel of the North 'It had to be that big in order to work. It's a drawing against the sky.

The light comes through it and it looks down on people crossing the river.' He is also building a 25 metre-high sculpture in Holland, making 100 works for Chatsworth and designing a ballet for 16 monks from the Shaolin monastery. His White Cube show has just opened and in May he will hear whether he has won the competition to fill the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square; his idea is to invite 8,760 members of the public to stand on the plinth for an hour each. If it happens, it will lead to more accusations of 'populism' which the art world seems to regard as a sin, but luckily, he believes that anything that encourages public interest in contemporary art is worth doing. I'm not sure what to make of him. In a strange way, his articulacy tells against him.

His brother Brendan once said that the family believed he was 'a better bullshitter than he is an artist' and certainly when he is spieling away about his bubble matrix, I want to say: 'Oh stop trying to blind me with science, just go away and make something.' But you can be a good bullshitter and a good artist and with public projects like The Angel of the North or Another Place you have to be, because you have to bullshit the council or whatever into believing the work will be important and then produce a work that actually is important. It's interesting that he says what drives him as a sculptor is: 'How do you make the timelessness of inert, silent objects count for something? How to use the, in a way, dumbness of sculpture in a way that acts on us as living things.' Perhaps he, too, distrusts his own fluency. Life class: Gormley's CV 1950 Born 30 August, the youngest of seven children in a Catholic family. He grew up in London and attended the Yorkshire public school Ampleforth. 1968 Began studies in archaeology and history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge. His friends included Tate director Nicholas Serota.

1974 Attended Central School of Art before moving to Goldsmiths College and completing his studies in 1979 at the Slade where he met his wife, painter Vicken Parsons. They have three children, Ivo, Guy and Paloma. 1980 Created the works Mother's Pride and Room which led to an interest in bodycasting. 1981 Received his first major show, at the Whitechapel Gallery. 1994 Won the Turner Prize for Field which featured 40,000 tiny terracotta figures. 1997 Awarded an OBE for services to sculpture. 1998 The Angel of the North, a 20-metre steel sculpture designed by Gormley, is unveiled in Gateshead. 2007 Sefton Council confirms that Gormley's work Another Place, consisting of 100 figures on Crosby Beach, Liverpool, will remain there permanently. Ally Carnwath · Images of Change by Sefryn Penrose, with a foreword by Antony Gormley , is published by English Heritage, £17.99.

Gormley's show Firmament is at the White Cube gallery, Mason's Yard, London SW1, until 12 April. Antony Gormley Furious with Pro-Brexit Group - artnet News Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North near Gateshead, England. Photo: David Wilson Clarke via Wikimedia Commons. Sculptor Anthony Gormley at his studio. Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty Images. British artist Antony Gormley is well and truly fuming. The anti-EU group Vote Leave , which campaigns for the UK’s exit from the European Union, has used the artist’s iconic Angel of the North statue to project their slogan “Vote Leave, Take Control” along a red ballot box.

Sir Gormley, according to the Express , has asked his lawyers to send a letter to the pro-Brexit (a portmanteau for “British” and “exit”) campaigners, accusing them of “manipulation” of the artwork’s “instantly recognisable character.” “As an artist with a substantial reputation in the United Kingdom and worldwide, it amounts to passing off to suggest a false endorsement by, or connection with, Sir Antony in connection with the activities and political purposes of Vote Leave Limited,” the letter reads, as reported by the Telegraph . “Presumably the reputation of the work and its instantly recognizable character were the reasons that it was selected for the projection or digital manipulation,” the letter continues, describing the Angel of the North as one of the most famous artworks in the UK. The Vote Leave slogan. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. The letter also states that Vote Leave should have known that “their use of the Angel of the North as an advertising medium is both unlawful and damaging to the integrity of this important work”.

Ironically, the pro-Brexit group’s choice is doubly misguided, as Gormley’s 175-feet tall steel public sculpture, whose total cost was £800,000 ($1.1 million), was developed with funding from the European Union. “It’s very disappointing that our iconic structures have been misused in this way, particularly as the council welcomes the benefits that Gateshead residents receive from UK membership of the European Union,” a Gateshead council spokesperson told the Guardian . Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North near Gateshead, England. Photo: David Wilson Clarke via Wikimedia Commons. “It’s also somewhat ironic that both the Angel of the North and Baltic [art center] actually benefited from European regional development funding, along with many other important projects in Gateshead,” the spokesperson added. British citizens, and foreigners living in the United Kingdom, are in turmoil as the date of the referendum on whether the country will stay or leave the European Union—slated for June 23—approaches. According to a poll published by the Telegraph this week, 52 percent of Britons who plan to vote in the referendum supports Brexit, while 45 percent supports staying in the EU.

The Angel of the North The Angel of the North Home / Leisure & Culture / Tourism / The Angel of the North The Angel of the North Since spreading its wings in February 1998, Antony Gormley's The Angel of the North has become one of the most talked about pieces of public art ever produced. Antony Gormley: British Sculptor, Installation Artist Field (UK version) (1994) Tate Gallery Installation of terracotta figures, winner of Turner Prize 1994. CONTEMPORARY ART AWARDS See: Turner Prize Winners . Antony Gormley (b.1950) The sculptor Antony Gormley OBE RA is one of England's leading artists. A student at Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art, a student of Buddhism, and winner of the 1994 Turner Prize , his monumental steel sculpture and installation art can be seen in locations around the world.

His most famous works include the 20-metre high public art statue Angel of the North (1994-8, located beside the A1/M1 near Gateshead in Northern England); the series of terracotta figures entitled Field (1994, Tate Gallery, London); and the life-size cast iron figures entitled Another Place (1997, Crosby Beach, near Liverpool). Other popular works include Bed (1980-1, made out of slices of bread, Tate Gallery, London); Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage (1981, Tate Gallery, London); Man Falling (1985, private collection); and Maquette for Leeds Brick Man (1986, Leeds City Art Gallery). Gormley is one of the most innovative 20th century sculptors in Britain. For earlier artists, see: Modern British sculpture (1930-70). Angel of the North (1994) Gateshead, England. For a list of the world's most talented 3-D artists, see: Greatest Sculptors .

Early Life Gormley was born in London in 1950, the youngest of seven children, his mother was German and his father was Irish. He grew up in the wealthy suburb of Hampstead Garden, and attended Ampleforth College in Yorkshire. Between 1966 and 1971 he read archeology, anthropology and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, after which he travelled extensively in the Near and Far East (1971-4), studying the artistic cultures of the ancient lands and the influence of Buddhism. On his return to the UK he decided to pursue an art career and began his artistic studies in London at several art colleges including the Central School, Goldsmiths College and the Slade School. From the 1980s onwards he was included in international group shows and had his first solo show in London in 1981 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. His first one-man New York show followed in 1984. Most of Gormley's sculptures are of a figurative nature, based on casts of his own body.

These life-size works have no specific features and are weldered together in static poses - crouching, standing, and lying on the floor or hanging on the wall and ceiling. To create the sculpture, Gormley is wrapped in clingfilm, then cloth, then wet plaster. Tubes are inserted into his nose to permit breathing. Once the plaster is dry, he is cut out of the resulting mould, and lead or other molten metal is used to fill the empty space. Turner Prize In 1994 Gormley was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize for his work 'Field', a work which consists of approximately 35,000 individual terracotta figures, each between 8 and 26cm high, installed in a room, facing the viewer. Their eyes are raised, staring, suggesting timeless humanity and its perplexities. The figures were sculpted in Mexico by a family of brick makers, under the supervision of the artist. When it was unveiled at the Tate Gallery in 1994, the sculpture received much popular press - but there was also some negative feeling as some members of the public felt that credit for the work should go to the Mexican family, and not the artist.

Although the sculpture has been installed in various locations, the miniatures are always placed looking towards the viewer. Subsequently several other versions of Field have been created including: Amazonian Field (1991, 24,000 figures sculpted in Porto Velho, Brazil); Field for the British Isles (1993, 40,000 figures crafted in St Helens, Liverpool); European Field (1993, 40,000 figures carved in Sweden); Asian Field China (2003, created in the Guangdong province, China); Asian Field Japan (2004, 200,000 figures sculpted in Tokyo) and Field for the Art Gallery of New South Wales (1989). The 2006 Sydney Biennale featured Gormley's Asian Field of China. The sculpture was made by 350 Chinese villagers in 5 days from 100 tons of red clay. Again, the appropriation of other people's labour, led to some of the figurines being stolen in protest.

Note About Sculpture Appreciation To learn how to evaluate postmodernist sculptors like Antony Gormley, see: How to Appreciate Modern Sculpture . For earlier works, please see: How to Appreciate Sculpture . Sculpture: Another Place In 1997 Gormley created Another Place. He forged 100 life-size cast iron standing figures that are spread across 3 kilometres of beach near Liverpool. The figures are all cast from the artist's own body and are shown in different stages of rising out of the sand, looking towards the water, staring, silently. The work is sometimes associated with the universal sentiments associated with emigration, of loss and new beginnings. Gormley is considered by this work, and others, to have rescued the human figure - a central theme of sculpture since classical antiquity - from its long period of abstention during Abstract Expressionism's popularity. In 2006 the statues were to be moved to New York, but after successful local appeal they will now remain permanently in Liverpool. Sculpture: Angel of the North Since the early 1990s Gormley has worked on more large-scale installations.

One of his most famous is the statue Angel of the North, situated by the A1/M1 Motorway, near Gateshead in England. The sculpture is 20 meters high, its wing-span is 54 metres, and it weighs nearly 200 tons. Inspired by childhood memories of imaginary guardian angels, Gormley aimed to replicate one of these divine helpers in this work. Angel of the North also embodies ideas about technology and progress, in particular how man has changed as a result of progress and to what extent his body is dependent on technology. The Angel of the North is based on the artists own body, albeit greatly magnified. The sculpture, made from Cor-Ten weather resistant steel, was created in three pieces off site at a local steel factory, at a cost of one million pounds. Trafalgar Square: Fourth Plinth The Fourth Plinth is the name given to the empty plinth in the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square in London. Originally designed in 1841 to display an equestrian statue, funds ran out and so the plinth became known as the 'empty plinth'.

In 1998 the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts commissioned a series of three works by Mark Wallinger, Bill Woodrow, and Rachel Whiteread to be displayed temporarily on the plinth. Ever since then, the Plinth has been used for temporary installations and art works by international artists. Mark Quinn created a sculpture called Alison Lapper Pregnant - a portrait of Lapper, a disabled artist, when she was 8 months pregnant. The sculpture was created out of a single block of white marble and created a high level of media interest. In 2009 Gormley was given a spot on the plinth. He called his installation One & Other. Basically one person stood on the Plinth, every hour, 24 hours a day for 100 days. The people who participated were known as Plinthers, and were allowed to make the Plinth their own space for that one hour. Those 2,400 people who took part were chosen randomly from 35,000 website requests. One & Other ran between 6 July and 14 October 2009.

International Recognition In recent works, Gormley has created figures from wire, so as to make the inner space visible, emphasising the imaginative potential and openness of his sculptures. These have proven popular in commercial galleries around the world. His work has been exhibited in some of the best art museums in the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Louisiana Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; the Irish Museum of Modern art in Dublin; the Moderna Museet in Stockholm; and the Kolnischer Kunstverein in Germany. In 2009 he had a solo show at the Galleria Continua Beijing and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg. Currently a trustee of the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art and the British Museum, Gormley is also an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He continues to live and work in London.  For more about the history and styles of plastic art, see: Homepage .  For more about contemporary sculpture, see: Contemporary Art .

The Angel of the North background The Angel of the North background The Angel of the North The Angel's silhouette at the head of the Team Valley now rivals that of the famous Tyne Bridge. A panoramic hilltop site was chosen where the sculpture would be clearly seen by more than 90,000 drivers a day on the A1 - more than one person every second - and by passengers on the East Coast main line from London to Edinburgh. The site, a former colliery pithead baths synonymous with Gateshead mining history, was re-claimed as a green landscape during the early 1990s. Antony Gormley The Artist The sculpture was designed by internationally renowned sculptor Antony Gormley. Antony Gormley OBE, who was born in 1950, is at the forefront of a generation of celebrated younger British artists who emerged during the 1980s. He has exhibited work around the world and has major public works in the USA, Japan, Australia, Norway and Eire. Public work in Britain can be seen in locations as diverse as the crypt at Winchester Cathedral and Birmingham city centre.

In 1994 he won the prestigious Turner Prize and in 1997 was awarded the OBE for services to sculpture. He has exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Gallery, British Museum and the Henry Moore Sculpture Gallery in Leeds. "People are always asking, why an angel? The only response I can give is that no-one has ever seen one and we need to keep imagining them. The angel has three functions - firstly a historic one to remind us that below this site coal miners worked in the dark for two hundred years, secondly to grasp hold of the future, expressing our transition from the industrial to the information age, and lastly to be a focus for our hopes and fears - a sculpture is an evolving thing." Gormley said of the Angel: "The hilltop site is important and has the feeling of being a megalithic mound. When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site, there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now in the light, there is a celebration of this industry. The face will not have individual features.

The effect of the piece is in the alertness, the awareness of space and the gesture of the wings - they are not flat, they're about 3.5 degrees forward and give a sense of embrace. The most important thing is that this is a collaborative venture. We are evolving a collective work from the firms of the North East and the best engineers in the world."

Question: ‘The Angel of the North’ is the work of which British sculptor?
Answer: Antony Gormley