Books: Antony Gormley 

Illustrated with hundreds of images that explore the scale and impact of his work, a new and updated edition of the definitive monograph on the British artist Antony Gormley has been published by Rizzoli. 

Drawing on images that range from childhood snap-shots to photographs of his most recent installations, this book traces the evolution of Gormley’s work, from the drawings he makes every day in the studio, through the constantly evolving process of casting his own body to the colossal Angel of the North and the scattered figures of Another Place.

Gormley’s new solo exhibition, ’Body Space Time is currently being held in Tuscany at the Galleria Continua in San Gimignano. In a recent Interview with the Guardian, Gormley discussed a selection of his  works with writer, Claire Armistead:

Small Stem Model (2019)

“This is Rodin’s Thinker on the toilet, with its head dropped on to its folded arms. It was a huge evolution for me. I’ve never made something so absolute. In the Venice show it’s a small graphite model; in San Gimignano it’s life size, and it had to be accurate to 200ths of a millimetre. This is me trying to materialise the internal space of the body in the language of architecture. This is where I am now in the work – but that idea of mapping the inner space of the body has been in the work for a long time.”

Grenfell II (2017)

“I felt that what happened to Grenfell Tower was such a tragic story of human greed and laziness and wishful thinking. But it was also about the absolute opposite: an extraordinary community, with its artists, social workers, nurses and teachers. When you saw it from the Westway after the fire it was a black outline, not dissimilar from my charcoal drawing, asking the same questions my sculptures ask: is this the condition in which we live? Is this now our habitat?”

Subject III (2021)

“Now that over 50% of our species lives within the urban grid, we are implicit in and dependent upon our context. So this is a body in a position of supplication, though it isn’t actually praying. I think it is saying that we are now supplicants within an organisation of the world that is in our computers, our digital technology, as well as in the axial grid of our cities, and the horizontal and vertical planes of our architecture.”

You can purchase a copy of 'Antony Gormley' here: https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780847871612