Antony Gormley

Having briefly studied contemporary dance at Cambridge as an extra-curricular activity, Antony Gormley has taken an active interest in the choreographic worlds of Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Pina Bausch, Bill Forsythe, Siobhan Davies and Michael Clarke. The inspiration of pure dance, with the body released as an expressive subject in its own right, detached from concerns with narrative, has been an inspiration for thirty years. He is less interested in the courtly disciplines of traditional ballet and more in the evolution begun by Martha Graham in which the body and its relationship to the floor and gravity opened up new expressive potentials for the language of the body in motion. 

While spending a great deal of time trying to make material equivalents to what it feels like to inhabit a body, Antony Gormley has always had great interest in watching other bodies in dance. He considers the dancer’s life the most generous and demanding of any profession using life itself as the primary medium of communication. 

Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. 

Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally. His work in dance includes the critically acclaimed collaborations with Akram Khan, Hofesh Shechter, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Nitin Sawhney on zero degrees (2005, Sadler’s Wells) and again with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui on Sutra (2008, Sadler’s Wells); Babel(words) (2010, Sadler’s Wells) for which he was given an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance for the design of the set (2011); Noetic (2014, Göteborg Opera) and on Icon (2016, Göteborg Opera).