![\"Antony](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/5cf719cc-a6b8-459f-afa3-2ddb836ed0ee.jpg\")
Gormley at his King\u2019s Cross studioRobert Wilson for The Times<\/p>\nIt\u2019s disconcerting meeting Antony Gormley. Shouldn\u2019t he be waist-deep in the waves or at the edge of a precipice or buried up to his neck in the earth? Yet here he is, flesh and blood, sitting on a spinning office chair replying to his emails.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t like getting very involved with all of this.\u201d He waves his hands at a computer screen open at his inbox. New messages ping throughout our interview. After a few interrupted days, he says, \u201cmy fingers get a bit itchy. This is my escape and also my playground.\u201d Here he makes drawings and models away from the factory-like space downstairs.<\/p>\n
Gormley\u2019s King\u2019s Cross headquarters, designed by the architect David Chipperfield, is an otherworldly place. When the sliding gate shuts, you wouldn\u2019t know London was there. At the heart of the studio is a hangar where bodies are trussed from the rafters and new forms take shape on the ground. I\u2019m allowed to crawl inside a work-in-progress: a compact labyrinth of stacked and misaligned boxes. Two external staircases take you up to offices on the right and studios on the left.<\/p>\n
Gormley at his King\u2019s Cross studioRobert Wilson for The Times<\/p>\n
Gormley is \u201ctuning\u201d two exhibitions due to open within weeks of each other. The first is Geestgrond at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. The second is What Holds Us at the Galleria Continua in San Gimignano. A book of Gormley\u2019s drawings will be published next week by Thames & Hudson. The book opens with a call to arms: \u201cA day passed without drawing is a day lost.\u201d<\/p>\n
Antwerp seems an incongruous setting. I can\u2019t quite see Gormley\u2019s lean, reticent sculpture among the Flemish masters of the Antwerp collection, not least Rubens and his double-cream fleshiness.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d Gormley admits, \u201cRubens\u2019s canvases are not my cup of tea.\u201d Gormley read anthropology, archaeology and history of art at Cambridge with a special subject in Flemish art of the 17th century. \u201cI did Jacob Jordaens, Duquesnoy, Rubens and Van Dyck.\u201d Nice to imagine the ascetic young Gormley writing essays about Rubens\u2019s portrait of H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Fourment. \u201cThere\u2019s something about the flesh and the fur\u2026\u201d Even Iron Man Gormley is not insensible to such things.<\/p>\n
Gormley was born in 1950, the youngest of seven children. His father was a pharmaceuticals manufacturer and the Gormleys were prosperous, with high expectations of their children. The family were Catholic \u2014 the artist Antony Mark David\u2019s initials were meant to call to mind the Latin ad majorem dei gloriam (\u201cto the greater glory of God\u201d) and Gormley went to Ampleforth College, a Catholic boarding school. After graduating from Cambridge in 1971, he spent three years in India and Sri Lanka seriously considering becoming a Buddhist monk. (Above his desk is a sign that reads \u201cKeep calm and attain moksha.\u201d) It was while painting in Darjeeling that he thought he might become an artist instead.<\/p>\n
He studied at the Central School of Art and Design in London, then Goldsmiths and the Slade, where he met his wife, the artist Vicken Parsons. He won the Turner prize in 1994 and The Angel of the North spread its wings over Gateshead in 1998. His body, in lead, iron and concrete, even imprinted into Mother\u2019s Pride bread, has been the starting point for much of this work.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/bb08ea92-3f56-4479-aa47-6e22276ec4f8.jpg\")
Angel of the North, Gateshead, 1998alamy<\/p>\n
One of the words Gormley uses often is \u201cattention\u201d. Works of art ask for our attention and give us something in return. Focus, however, is hard to find. \u201cWe\u2019re in a time of distraction. People, perhaps, do look for art for a kind of thrill. But I think that\u2019s not what it does best. I think that art can relink you with first-hand being.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of my beefs is with art \u201cexperiences\u201d that promise to bring paintings \u201calive\u201d when they are plenty alive already if you\u2019ll only stop and look. \u201cI guess the danger of the art of our times,\u201d Gormley says, \u201cis that it\u2019s a competitor in the attention economy, and that rather than saying actually we need to look for the world in a grain of sand, we want the world in lights and sound and movement all around us. Now. Now. Now.\u201d<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t mean you have to stand stiffly in front of a work of art sombrely stroking your chin. Certainly not if it\u2019s a sculpture. Gormley reels off a checklist. Move around it. Maybe touch it. Smell it. \u201cWe want to know: is it hollow? Is it solid? How does it sit? Is it sitting kind of resistantly? Or is it sitting precariously?\u201d<\/p>\n
Could visitors touch the works in the Antwerp show? He pauses. \u201cThe lead work is poisonous, so that\u2019s probably not such a good idea. The iron work is very fragile.\u201d But by the time you get to the big installations, you can touch them all you like.<\/p>\n
Would he consider banning phones? He did it with Horizon Field in Hamburg. \u201cI asked people to leave their shoes and their socks and their phones \u2014 in fact, anything that they didn\u2019t really need \u2014 before they went up on to this platform that was held by eight cables about seven and a quarter metres from the ground.\u201d People danced, people lay on the surface of this strange \u201cflying carpet\u201d, people looked at the sky or out at the city. No one scrolled or took a selfie.<\/p>\n
![\"Antony](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/f03121c7-1a17-49be-9ac5-81e3144ed88c.jpg\")
Room, London, 2014Alamy<\/p>\n
I have young children and while I worry about what the modern world does to our ability to concentrate, I worry more about whether they will ever write longhand or throw a pot or stitch a seam. How are we going to foster an interest in making and materials in the age of AI? Gormley sits up at this.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve got to have a bag of clay as part of your monthly if not weekly shopping list. There\u2019s got to be in your home somewhere devoted to making mess.\u201d (All of it, Antony.) \u201cI think it\u2019s really, really, really important. We\u2019re being deskilled by the fact that we\u2019ve been constantly sucked into a virtual world and through our external brain instruments.\u201d<\/p>\n
He will sit at the kitchen table with his five grandchildren and say: \u201c\u2018Make a creature. It doesn\u2019t matter whether it exists or it\u2019s just coming into existence in your hands.\u2019 It doesn\u2019t take long before there are lots of creatures talking to each other on the table.\u201d That\u2019s what the Drawing book is about. \u201cThe thing I want it to produce is not awe and admiration, but the idea that \u2018I could do this\u2019 and encouraging people to do so, because there\u2019s nothing like it.\u201d<\/p>\n
At school he had a two-hour drawing lesson each week from the age of 12 to 17. \u201cI can remember them so clearly.\u201d He would sit on a \u201chorse\u201d (a traditional drawing bench, also sometimes called a \u201cdonkey\u201d) with a T-square and a drawing board. The still life set up by the art master may not have been all that exciting \u2014 \u201ca gingham cloth, the head of Dante and a bunch of daffodils\u201d, he recalls \u2014 \u201cbut all you could hear was a scratching of pencils on paper and that time of attention and the smell of freshly sharpened cedar pencils\u201d.<\/p>\n
Last year Gormley was part of a group of artists and musicians who lobbied the education department over the devaluing of arts subjects in the curriculum. The English Baccalaureate<\/a>, introduced by the previous coalition government, has steered pupils towards taking eight core academic subjects while excluding arts and vocational subjects. \u201cThe art room should be the liveliest place of any school. You\u2019re invited to make things that have never been made before.\u201d <\/p>\n There are Gormleys all over the world. In piazzas and on parapets, in rivers and out at sea. (Naughty Nicky Haslam has included \u201cAntony Gormley sculptures\u201d on his Christmas tea towel lists of \u201cThings Nicky Haslam finds \u2018common\u2019\u201d.)<\/p>\n Would he accept a commission \u2014 for the technical challenge if nothing else \u2014 to put a Gorm on the moon? \u201cNo, no, no. I think that would be a bad idea.\u201d What he is excited about is a work he is making for Sinan in South Korea \u201cthat uses the highest level of engineering fabrication possible to us as a species\u201d. A figure made up of 38 cubes will appear to be washed up on the beach. At high tide it will be entirely submerged, at low tide revealed.<\/p>\n He is gloomy about the \u201cclimate emergency\u201d. So I wonder \u2014 couldn\u2019t the art world do its bit? There is something obscene about the climate pieties and champagne receptions of the international biennale circuit. \u201cI think it is a real problem: the art world fuelled by just thousands and millions of air miles that take off with the same crowd, to see often the same artists but in different contexts.<\/p>\n \u201cMy resistance to all of that is a wish to spend whatever time is left to me making situated works that are hopefully about a dialogue with a particular place, particular environment, particular community.\u201d<\/p>\n Gormley is in some respects a tricky interviewee. Grayson Perry<\/a> gives you a quip a minute. Gilbert and George<\/a> do a vaudeville routine. There\u2019s no difficulty getting Gormley going; it\u2019s following along that\u2019s difficult. \u201cProprioceptive instrument\u201d? \u201cReflexive\u00a0space\u201d? \u201cMaterialised dialogues\u201d? <\/p>\n But he isn\u2019t always like this. Three years ago, dropping into Gormley\u2019s Body Politic exhibition<\/a> at White Cube Bermondsey, I found the artist giving a tour to teenagers from a local school. He stretched, he crouched, he challenged the students to work out where the supports were hidden. He didn\u2019t mention Socrates once. It was just about the best lesson in how to look at sculpture I\u2019ve heard. The students were rapt. A similar thing happens when I stop recording. Gnomic Gormley is gone. Normal Gormley is warm, amused and human.<\/p>\n His wife has the studio next door. Does he ever knock on the wall and say: \u201cElevenses?\u201d \u201cYeah, I go in there for my breaks. There is always a certain amount of\u2026 It\u2019s kind of like a Tesla coil, a certain amount of cracking and popping in here, and you go next door into her studio, which is the same size as this one, and it\u2019s just contemplative peace.\u201d We go round after the interview \u2014 Parsons is preparing for an exhibition at Magdalene College Library in Cambridge \u2014 and it is indeed peaceful, with birthday tulips in vases and work in progress on the walls.<\/p>\n Gormley has a photograph of Parsons above his desk; she has a picture of the two of them together. Often when you read habits-of-highly-successful-people-type articles, alongside the usual stuff about getting up at 4am and wearing the same outfit every day, the highly successful person will say that it helps to marry the right partner. Gormley\u2019s golems are often intensely solitary, yet he seems so contentedly paired.<\/p>\n \u201cI just think that artists should spend time with artists\u2026 It has been an amazing journey having this companion that I think understands the vocation. And even though my work is so, so different, I think we share a lot of attitudes to what art can be in terms of a place of reflexivity.\u201d <\/p>\n I still don\u2019t understand what a place of reflexivity is, but the next time I spot a Gormley marooned in the ocean, it won\u2019t seem lonely any more.<\/p>\n Geestgrond is at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp from May 23 to Sep 20 (kmska.be<\/a>). Drawing by Antony Gormley (Thames & Hudson \u00a350 pp320) is published on Apr 23. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk<\/a>. Free UK standard P&P on orders over \u00a325. Special discount available for Times+ members<\/p>\n Where to see Gormley around the UK<\/p>\n Another Place, Crosby beach, Merseyside, 1997<\/p>\n Another Place \u2014 100 life-size, cast-iron figures staring out to sea \u2014 was supposed to stand on Crosby Beach for only 16 months. Three decades later, they are still there. (Half have been dug out of the mud and set upright again.) Sooner or later, Gormley has said, they will \u201cslowly turn into Giacomettis\u201d worn thinner and thinner by the tides. Visit Margate in Kent and you will spot another submarine man in the waves below Turner Contemporary.<\/p>\n Angel of the North, Gateshead, 1998<\/p>\n Is there a more artistic stretch of motorway in Britain than the junction of the A1 and the A167? The Angel of the North, with its mighty 54m wings, is seen by an estimated 33 million people each year. When first approached, Gormley said, \u201cI don\u2019t do roundabout art,\u201d but after visiting the site he was persuaded. In a twist that would intrigue Gormley the anthropologist, a copse at the foot of the Angel has become a memorial site to lost babies and children.<\/p>\n Sound II, Winchester Cathedral crypt, 1986<\/p>\n Head bowed, solitary and silent, Gormley\u2019s Sound II stands in the crypt of Winchester Cathedral. When the crypt floods \u2014 very biblical \u2014 the lead figure is as isolated as a hermit or a stylite. As the water rises, a channel inside the body of the sculpture draws up water to pool in his cupped hands. In Canterbury Cathedral, Gormley\u2019s Transport, constructed from iron nails removed from the roof of the southeast transept, hangs above the first tomb of Thomas Becket.<\/p>\n Room, London, 2014<\/p>\n Clamped to the back of a Mayfair hotel, Room is a crouching figure from the outside and a luxury, if sombre, hotel suite on the inside. A night with Sir Antony Gormley RA at the Beaumont hotel is about \u00a32,425 \u2014 or you can see Room from the street on the way to the RA, where exhibition tickets are about \u00a325. Look out for Gormley\u2019s stainless-steel figure Cinch on the roof of the Burlington Arcade.<\/p>\n True, for Alan Turing, Cambridge, 2024<\/p>\n Against the pointed arches and ogee windows of King\u2019s College, Gormley\u2019s monument to the mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing, all blocks and right angles, stands apart. Cast in Cor-Ten steel, which contains 1 per cent copper, the statue will oxidise over time and turn a rich rust red.<\/p>\n 6 Times, Edinburgh, 2010<\/p>\n Set off from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and wind your way along the waters of the Leith to the docks and you will encounter Gormley six times, sunken to the shoulders, paddling in the shallows and, finally, out on a jetty, spattered by seagulls. In winter you may find yourself doing a double-take. Surely no flesh-and-blood man would be brave enough \u2014 or mad enough \u2014 to take a dip?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s disconcerting meeting Antony Gormley. Shouldn\u2019t he be waist-deep in the waves or at the edge of a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-591335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/9874bfcf-a46d-4237-81a0-e76678d99391.jpg\")
Attend, 2025Stephen White<\/p>\n![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/73b89b87-7437-427b-9758-8977aa0fd77b.jpg\")
Hold I, 2022, from Gormley\u2019s Inkcap Drawings series<\/p>\n![\"Antony](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/dee4e8e2-f3cf-41d5-859f-1b3976f9a650.jpg\")
6 Times, Edinburgh, 2010Alamy<\/p>\n