Gormley said of the New York site, "Within the condensed environment of Manhattan's topography, the level of tension between the palpable, the perceivable, and the imaginable is heightened because of the density and scale of the buildings" and that in this context, the project should "activate the skyline in order to encourage people to look around. In 2007, Gormley's Event Horizon, consisting of 31 life-sized and anatomically correct casts of his body, four in cast iron and 27 in fiberglass, was installed on top of prominent buildings along London's South Bank, and installed in locations around New York City's Madison Square in 2010. Also in 2006, the burning of Gormley's 25-m high The Waste Man formed the zenith of the Margate Exodus. Use of others' works attracted minor comment. The 2006 Sydney Biennale featured Gormley's Asian Field, an installation of 180,000 small clay figurines crafted by 350 Chinese villagers in five days from 100 tons of red clay. The work is not symbolic but indexical – a trace of a real event of a real body in time. Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live." Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or "the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside." His work attempts to treat the body not as an object, but as a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. Almost all his work takes the human body as its subject, with his own body used in many works as the basis for metal castings.
Gormley's career began with a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981. One of 31 actual-sized figures on London's skyline in Event Horizon He expected to receive his new passport within the next month. In June 2022 Gormley said that he had applied for German citizenship, to which he is entitled through his German mother, after describing Brexit as "a practical disaster" and a "betrayal". I just feel so lucky and so blessed really, that I have such a strong supporter, and lover, and fellow artist. I think there are a lot of myths that art is made by, usually, lone men. Gormley said of her: įor the first 15 years she was my primary assistant. While at the Slade, Gormley met Vicken Parsons, who was to become his assistant, and in 1980, his wife, as well as a successful artist in her own right. Īfter attending Saint Martin's School of Art and Goldsmiths in London from 1974, he completed his studies with a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, between 19. He travelled to India and the Dominion of Ceylon / Sri Lanka to learn more about Buddhism between 19. He attended Ampleforth College, a Benedictine boarding school in Yorkshire, before reading archaeology, anthropology, and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1968 to 1971. Gormley grew up in a Roman Catholic family living in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Gormley has stated that his parents chose his initials, "AMDG", to have the inference Ad maiorem Dei gloriam – "to the greater glory of God". The ancestral homeland of the Gormley Clan (Irish: Ó Goirmleadhaigh) in Ulster was East Donegal and West Tyrone, with most people in both Derry and Strabane being of County Donegal origin. His paternal grandfather was an Irish Catholic from Derry who settled in Walsall in Staffordshire. Gormley was born in London, the youngest of seven children, to a German mother and a father of Irish descent.