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Antony Gormley

One of the UK's most iconic artists, Antony Gormley has produced an astonishingly consistent body of work over the last 25 years. Using the human form to explore man's existence in and relation to the world his sculptures range from vast steel figures, to plaintive masses of tiny clay figures, with his archetypal life-size body casts somewhere in between.

Numerous public institutions hold Gormley's work as part of their collections, including the Tate Gallery London, the Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal, and the LA Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1994 Antony Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize for Field, and is perhaps best-known for his large outdoor sculpture Angel of the North.

Throughout his career, Gormley has used his own body as the starting point to produce sculptures that investigate what it feels like to be in a body. He has developed syntax for the body in works that present it in various positions, standing, lying, crouching, and falling. He simultaneously explores the felt experience of being a body in the world; that is the body's relation to architecture and to nature. He has created some of the most ambitious and memorable works of the past two decades including Field, The Angel of the North as well as Quantum Cloud situated in the River Thames at Greenwich.

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950. Upon completing his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, he travelled to India, returning to London three years later to study at the Central School of Art, Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art, London.

Antony Gormley has created large-scale installations in Cuxhaven, Germany and at the Royal Academy in London and has also participated in several international group shows such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta 8. Gormley has also had touring museum retrospectives in both Europe and Japan, whilst the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela hosted a solo show of his works in early 2002.

Gormley has commissioned works such as 'Planets' permanently on display at the British Library and has completed a commission for the Perth International Arts Festival for 2003. The British Library will mount a large exhibition of Gormley's drawings in late 2002. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994 and the South Bank prize in 1999.