For more than thirty-five years, Antony Gormley has sought to explore the relationship of the human body to space and to reinvigorate and test the potential of sculpture with dramatic outdoor sitings. This definitive monograph, compiled in close collaboration with the artist, examines Gormley s career, from his earliest sketches to his best-known public installations. With unprecedented access to archives of unpublished work, the studio, and the artist himself, Martin Caiger-Smith examines the relationship between Gormley s life and art and identifies the vision that ties together a vast canon of work in an extraordinary range of media and materials. Best known for his major public works that most visibly represent his rigorous and innovative approach to sculpture, Gormley is a prolific and intellectual artist whose own privacy and interiority create a tension between ideas of the individual and the universal.
With images that range from childhood snapshots to photographs of his most recent gallery installations, this book traces the evolution of Gormley s work, from the drawings he makes in the studio, through the evolving process of casting his own body in various forms, to masterpieces such as the colossal Angel of the North or the scattered figures of Another Place. With lavish images that show the scale and impact of Gormley s work many never published before and with anecdotes and notes on process from the artist seamlessly integrated into Caiger-Smith s careful critical narrative, this book is a comprehensive survey of a truly monumental career.