The British sculptor Antony Gormley is a native Londoner who has been a fixture on the city’s art scene for decades and the subject of many museum shows all over the world, including a 2019 survey at the Royal Academy of Arts.
He won the prestigious Turner Prize in 1994 and was even knighted in 2014, gaining enough fame along the way to occasionally get the tabloid treatment from the British press (“Gorm Blimey: Statue by Sir Antony Gormley branded ‘hideous’ and a ‘waste of money,’” read a 2020 headline in The Sun.)
“I’m one of the ones they like to beat on,” Gormley, 74, said with a laugh on a video call in April from his country house in Norfolk, northeast of London.
Not that it has scared him from the limelight. Indeed, Gormley likes to talk about his art and its meaning, one on one or to a crowd.
His latest show, “Antony Gormley: Witness, Early Lead Works,” is on view until June 8 at White Cube gallery’s Mason’s Yard space in London, and he spoke at the Art for Tomorrow conference in Milan last week on topics that included art’s origins as a collective enterprise, the importance of collaboration and his own drive to create. “I don’t have a choice about what I do,” he said.
The gallery show is a skeleton key that helps to unlock some of the mysteries of his art, and most of the works are not for sale.
Although he became perhaps best known for figural sculptures — including the large public work “Angel of the North” (1998), a stylized, winged figure, which overlooks the A1 highway in Gateshead, England — his art is rooted in the Conceptual art of the 1970s.
“The show starts with five works that were all made prior to using my own body,” Gormley said, referring to a pivot point in 1981 that helped define the rest of his career. “They deal with found objects in one way or another, but always using the medium of lead.”
Those works include “Land Sea and Air I” (1977-79), which at first glance looks like three stones of similar shape; actually, the forms are oxidized lead cases, one of them surrounding a stone he brought back from Ireland. One is filled with water and one is empty, or “filled with air,” as Gormley put it.
“This was me investigating the distinction between substance and appearance, or between the skin of the thing and its mass,” Gormley said, adding that at the time it was made, there was widespread anxiety about nuclear proliferation.
By using the basic element of life, he said, it was a way of highlighting “the seeds of a future world beyond potential nuclear destruction.”
Artistically, it was a breakthrough. “I was so excited the night that I made that piece, I couldn’t sleep,” Gormley recalled. “I thought, ‘This is where I want to go. This is the foundation of what I’m going to do with my life.’”
Jay Jopling, a longtime dealer of Gormley’s and the founder of White Cube, recalled his first encounter with the artist some four decades ago. Jopling was only around 20 and studying art history, and he arranged to meet Gormley, whose work he already admired.
Over a cup of tea, the young Jopling asked Gormley about the meaning of his work. “He said, ‘My work is about what it means to be alive and alone and alert on this planet,’” Jopling said. “It was a nice, succinct answer.”
As his work was getting critical attention in the early 1980s, Gormley was not alone. Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain, noted that British art of the 20th century has always been particularly strong in sculpture.
Farquharson said that Gormley was “a key figure in a generation of several sculptors who emerged in the early ’80s — Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg, Alison Wilding and others.”
The White Cube show includes several works on paper from the 1980s, and has five lead sculptures from that decade and the following one; they show Gormley’s evolution toward his own version of figuration.
The sculptures include “Home and the World II” (1986-96) a striding figure with an 18-foot-long house where its head should be, and “Witness II” (1993), a figure seated on the ground with its head tucked into folded arms.
The materials for both include lead, fiberglass, plaster and air, but they could almost include Gormley himself, given that at the time, he had to be encased in a plaster mold to make them.
“It was really messy,” he said of a process that had him covered in cling wrap for protection, and then plaster, for an hour or two with a hole at his mouth to breathe.
Meditation and breathing exercises were employed, skills that he first gleaned on a two-year stint in India that came between his graduation from Cambridge University and his art degrees from Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Fine Art.
Some earlier training also helped. “I had a good Catholic upbringing, so I knew how to be obedient,” Gormley said.
Once he was out of it, the completed plaster mold was then covered in fiberglass to “harden it up,” Gormley said. Finally, the work was covered in thin sheets of lead, which he and an assistant pounded with a rubber hammer, a highly exertive way of making art.
Around two decades ago, Gormley began to move toward 3-D scanning. But he said that using his own body was the essential element, not the particular process.
“I wanted to cut out that artist-model distancing device,” he said. “I’ve stuck with the idea that my particular example of the universal human condition is good enough for me.”
Despite his renown in Britain, Gormley has had less exposure in the United States. But his first solo museum survey in the country will be on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas later this year, from Sept. 12 to Jan. 4.
“He’s one of the chief practitioners who has expanded how we think about the figure and the body,” said Jed Morse, the Nasher’s chief curator.
For viewers, the Nasher show will help complete the picture of Gormley’s trajectory after the early 1990s, which saw him embark in new directions.
In some works at the Nasher, like the Corten steel sculpture “Model Model II” (2022), Gormley turns his body into a series of boxy forms — in a way that could be seen as Cubist or pixelated, or both.
Gormley is constantly working, and drawing is a key activity for him. He pulled out a small notebook from his jacket pocket, full of sketches of bodies. “I couldn’t live without this,” he said.
Having his artistic process result in heavy lead sculptures, as seen in the White Cube show, may be even more resonant now, much further along in the digital age than when they were made.
“Sculpture can bring you back to something firsthand and palpable,” he said. “These are existential objects that hopefully can be used as instruments to investigate your own experience.”
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