Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Antony Gormley (born in 1950) is not simply a sculptor who makes casts of his own body – even if that’s probably what most of you, with your limited artistic knowledge confined to Salvador Dalí exhibitions, likely think. No, this son of the London bourgeoisie, educated at Cambridge and converted to Buddhism during an initiatory journey to India, is far more than that. He is the very embodiment of a fascinating contradiction: an intellectual aristocrat who creates art for the masses.
Let’s start with his first artistic obsession: the exploration of space through the human body. For over four decades, Gormley has transformed his own body into an experimental laboratory, a sort of organic spacecraft to explore the limits of our physical existence. His early works in lead, those empty shells cast from his body, are not merely narcissistic sculptures – as some short-sighted critics have suggested. No, they are profound meditations on existential emptiness, echoing Martin Heidegger’s concepts of being-in-the-world and the anxiety of nothingness.
Take Critical Mass II (1995): sixty cast-iron bodies, each weighing about 650 kilograms, arranged like randomly discarded corpses or aligned like soldiers standing at attention. This monumental installation is not merely a demonstration of physical strength – though the effect is undeniably striking. It’s a visceral meditation on the human condition, a contemporary memento mori that resonates with medieval ossuaries. Gormley forces us to confront our own mortality, our collective fragility, while evoking the atrocities of the 20th century. These anonymous, standardized bodies recall the victims of modern genocides as well as the alienated masses of our contemporary metropolises.
But perhaps it is in his public installations that Gormley reaches his conceptual apex. Event Horizon (2007), with its 31 silent sentinels perched on rooftops in London, then in New York, São Paulo, and Hong Kong, represents a masterful intervention in the urban fabric. These stoic figures, gazing at the horizon from their vertiginous perches, create a palpable tension between the individual and the crowd, between observer and observed. They evoke Michel Foucault’s reflections on surveillance and power while questioning our place in the postmodern urban landscape.
In Angel of the North (1998), this colossal 20-meter-tall figure with wings spanning 54 meters, Gormley transcends mere monumentalism to create a contemporary totem. Erected on a former coal mine in Gateshead, this sculpture is not just a symbol of urban regeneration – it is a mythological presence linking the industrial past to an uncertain future. The angel, with its posture both protective and menacing, recalls Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the Angel of History, propelled toward the future while contemplating the ruins of the past.
Gormley’s second major theme, less obvious but equally fascinating, is his exploration of geometry as a universal language of the body. His more recent series, like Blockworks, transform the human anatomy into abstract architectural configurations. These cubic figures, constructed from precisely calculated steel blocks, represent a fascinating evolution of his work. They echo Le Corbusier’s theories on the Modulor while evoking the pixels of our digital era.
These geometric works are not mere stylistic exercises. They represent a bold attempt to create a new sculptural vocabulary for the Anthropocene. By reducing the human body to its essential geometric components, Gormley builds a bridge between the organic and the digital, between the artisanal and the industrial. These pixelated figures are like ghosts in the machine, souls trapped in the matrix of our technological world.
Gormley creates works that operate on multiple levels simultaneously: they are accessible to the general public while carrying profound philosophical reflection. Unlike some contemporary artists who revel in hermeticism or empty spectacle, Gormley manages to create art that speaks both to the masses and to intellectuals.
Of course, some critics – mainly those who think contemporary art ended with Andy Warhol – reproach him for a certain repetitiveness. But it’s precisely this monomaniacal obstinacy that constitutes his strength. Like Samuel Beckett with his explorations of language or Giorgio Morandi with his still lifes, Gormley relentlessly plows the same furrow, uncovering new depths each time.
Gormley’s work is, in fact, a memento vivendi rather than a memento mori – a reminder not of our mortality, but of our embodied presence in the world. In an era where we are increasingly disembodied, lost in the meanders of the virtual, his work brutally brings us back to our physical condition, to our presence in space, to our fundamental being-in-the-world.
And if you still don’t understand the importance of Gormley, perhaps you should spend more time contemplating his works than refreshing your Instagram feed.