Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley OBE RA (born 30 August 1950) is an English sculptor. His best known works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in the North of England, commissioned in 1995 and erected in February 1998, Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool, and Event Horizon, a multi-part site installation which premiered in London in 2007, and in 2010 around Madison Square in New York City.


















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 a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. The work is not symbolic but indexical — a trace of a real event of a real body in time.




















I remember going to see his work in Liverpool on Crosby Beach with my old college friends. It was a good day out, but I was just a little worried if boats were to come in and not see them when the tide comes in as they have no lights on them etc. But they are a spectacular sight to just stand there and watch as the sun is setting.












The sculpture consists of 100 cast iron figures which face out to sea, spread over a 2 mile (3.2 km) stretch of the beach. Each figure is 189 cm tall (nearly 6 feet 2½ inches) and weighs around 650 kg (over 1400 lb).
In common with most of Gormley's work, the figures are cast replicas of the artist's own body. As the tides ebb and flow, the figures are revealed and submerged by the sea.

Quirky yet random design that in my opinion is brilliant.