Antony Gormley Quotes

#1. Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive - in the past, that was mixed up with other illustrative duties, but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern.

Antony Gormley

#2. How do you make the timelessness of inert, silent objects count for something? How to use the, in a way, dumbness of sculpture in a way that acts on us as living things?

Antony Gormley

#3. I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

Antony Gormley

#4. The elemental world we all live in is the darkness of the body.

Antony Gormley

#5. Public money should be spent on art but through individuals not committees.

Antony Gormley

#6. I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.

Antony Gormley

#7. It's a wonderful thing to make work that is unadorned either by context, framing or label, that can exist in the changing conditions of light, weather, wind.

Antony Gormley

#8. Western Australia is covered by granite, the largest single piece of Achaean rock that still lies on the surface of the, of, of the Earth, that's 2.5 to 2.9 billion years old. It's one of the most ancient and intact bits of the Earth's crust.

Antony Gormley

#9. Maybe this is a utopian view of art but I do believe that art can function as a vehicle, that it isn't just a cultural pursuit, something that happens in art galleries. Unless art is linked to experience and the fear and joy of that, it becomes mere icing on the cake.

Antony Gormley

#10. My best travelling experience lasted several years: between 1971 and 1974 when I bummed around the East. All I had with me was a cooking pot, a stove, a map and blankets and a couple of dhotis.

Antony Gormley

#11. I think critics are very useful. But I think that they, in a way, betray their position when they stop people looking for themselves.

Antony Gormley

#12. We are not moving towards some kind of goal. We are at the goal, and it is changing with us. If art has any purpose, it is to open our eyes to that fact.

Antony Gormley

#13. I always like to look for adventure when I go away. I have gone on several horse adventures with my wife - from Guangxi we went up to the High Tibetan region. We also went along the Hurunui River on horseback in the South Island of New Zealand.

Antony Gormley

#14. I want people to be excited about cooling towers and megasheds; they're as much part of our history as the rural barn.

Antony Gormley

#15. I just want my work to be part of the elemental world.

Antony Gormley

#16. It doesn't matter if you can't speak the same language. If you have pictures, or better still, if you can draw things, then you can communicate anything to anyone.

Antony Gormley

#17. I used to think that the great thing about sculpture was that, like Stonehenge, it was something that stood against time in an adamantine way, and was an absolute mass in space. Now I try to use the language of architecture to redescribe the body as a place.

Antony Gormley

#18. I was educated by monks - I thank them dearly for the education they gave me, but I am no longer a Catholic.

Antony Gormley

#19. It is as much the conversations between objects as between us and objects that make museums so valuable.

Antony Gormley

#20. There is no question that creative intelligence comes not through learning things you find in books or histories that have already been written, but by focusing on and giving value to experience as it happens.

Antony Gormley

#21. It's wonderful to see art in a museum, but it is institutionalised. I don't like the idea of the artwork as something that requires special conditions. I would like it to be universal.

Antony Gormley

#22. Due to the failure of politics, which has become a process of middle-management, art has become one of the last open spaces to question core beliefs and to design a viable future. Art becomes an open space where we can ask fundamental questions about ourselves.

Antony Gormley

#23. Our appearance belongs to others, we live in the darkness of the body-part of all darkness but felt.

Antony Gormley

#24. Art has to change things, and if it was immediately acceptable it would not be doing the job.

Antony Gormley

#25. I think scale is about, in a way, the apprehension of proportion, and all the proportions that mean things to us as human beings are related to the body.

Antony Gormley

#26. The making of a whole person and the creation of true individuals can only happen by singing and dancing and making art.

Antony Gormley

#27. I would say that the whole way that I have approached the body is as a space, not a thing - not an object to be improved, idealised or whatever, but simply to be dwelt in.

Antony Gormley

#28. The very first lead work that I made is called 'Land Sea and Air,' and is the enclosure of primal elements within that kind of carapace of lead.

Antony Gormley

#29. Judgment is very easy, but I think, on the whole, professional critics maybe see too much, and compare too much, and forget the joy of actually looking and contemplating for its own sake.

Antony Gormley

#30. '6 Times' is an attempt to reinvestigate the social responsibility of sculpture. The body in question is a particular body, but it doesn't really matter whose it is.

Antony Gormley

#31. Most big cities like London and Glasgow have great big rivers that are unmissable. What's brilliant about the Water of Leith is that it's so hidden. It's a secret.

Antony Gormley

#32. Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

Antony Gormley

#33. We're not on a journey to a goal, the goal is with us changing with us.

Antony Gormley

#34. Cities have become places where we are controlled, by CCTV and other means, in the same way as machines are controlled. My works provide an imaginative space in which this can be challenged. It's like opening a window in a closed room.

Antony Gormley

#35. I think that the equator could act as a great equalizer for all life on Earth, celebrated as the great energy belt of the planet. If all our energy grids were synchronized, the light side of the planet could provide energy for the dark side, according to the movement of the sun.

Antony Gormley

#36. I did spend a lot of time as a child very confused about whether I had a devil in me, or whether I was in a state of grace. I mean, these ideas are so potent to anybody with half an imagination.

Antony Gormley

#37. I think it's probably the Dutch who are to blame for starting the whole 'art business', because before they came along, art was attached to relatively stable structures, and it was everybody's. It was like going to the movies.

Antony Gormley

#38. If your work doesn't speak to people, it's beyond comprehension and risible, but if people engage with it, you become tarred with the brush of populism.

Antony Gormley

#39. I would like to go to Kalimantan island in Sumatra to see the carvings and longhouse sculptures. I've also always wanted to look at the wood carvings along the Sepik River in New Guinea.

Antony Gormley

#40. It is a depressing business talking to journalist.

Antony Gormley

#41. I'm trying to make work that is reflective and is encouraging of reflection.

Antony Gormley

#42. Making beautiful things for everyday use is a wonderful thing to do - making life flow more easily - but art confronts life, allowing it to stop and perhaps change direction - they are completely different.

Antony Gormley

#43. Art is not about understanding, it's about experience.

Antony Gormley

#44. I want to start where language ends.

Antony Gormley