Top 25 Antony Gormley Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

It is a depressing business talking to journalist.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.