Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley (b. 1950, London) makes sculptures, installations and public works about how the human body relates to space, often starting from casts or scans of his own body. He studied archaeology, anthropology and art history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then sculpture at Goldsmiths and the Slade. He won the Turner Prize in 1994, became an OBE in 1997 and a Royal Academician in 2003, and was knighted in 2014. His permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead), Another Place (Crosby Beach), Exposure (Lelystad) and Chord at MIT. Around 1999–2000 he left solid mass behind for open, energetic structures. The Quantum Cloud series grew out of a 1999 London conversation with quantum physicist Basil Hiley, a long-time collaborator of David Bohm, and writer F. David Peat. Hiley spoke about "pre-space", a mathematical structure beneath space-time and matter, and remarked that "algebra is the relationship of relationships." In the resulting works a human figure appears to condense out of a cloud of steel elements. A computer random-walk model, seeded from the surface of Gormley's body, places those elements. This makes the series one of the earliest physical artworks that take quantum theory as a direct structural and conceptual source.