Antony Gormley valuation
Casts his own body, puts it on beaches and rooftops, and made an angel out of Gateshead steel.
Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950, read archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, spent three years in India studying Buddhism, and then trained at Saint Martins and the Slade.
What a work by Antony Gormley is worth
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Bio
Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950, read archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, spent three years in India studying Buddhism, and then trained at Saint Martins and the Slade. Almost the entire body of work proceeds from a single method: casting his own body, usually with the help of his wife Vicken Parsons, and using that as a unit. The Angel of the North went up at Gateshead in 1998; Another Place put a hundred iron figures into the tide at Crosby; Field fills a room with tens of thousands of small clay figures made by local communities. He won the Turner Prize in 1994.
Large sculpture is made in editions, generally small, in cast iron, steel or bronze, and cast number, foundry and installation requirements matter — many works are engineered for a specific mounting and the fixings form part of the piece. Cast iron works installed outdoors are intended to rust, so surface oxidation is not damage, but structural corrosion is. Gormley draws constantly in carbon, casein and body fluids on heavy paper, and these are unique, numerous and comparatively accessible. There is a modest print output.
Body and Soul, and the later prints
Gormley's first etchings were Body and Soul, a portfolio of nine published by the Paragon Press in London in 1990 in an edition of thirty. The marks were made by pressing parts of his own body into soft-ground plates, an idea that began with his thumbprints smudging the edge of a plate. Each sheet is signed and numbered on the reverse, which is easy to miss once a print is framed.
The prints since then are more numerous, and the artist's own website lists them, which makes it a quick first check. Small editioned sculptures need the certificate and the studio's records of edition, foundry and date, since those details, rather than the form, are what a buyer is paying for.
Hampstead, the Whitechapel show and the lead body-cases
Gormley was born in Hampstead, the youngest of seven children of a German mother and an art-loving father of Irish descent, and he has said his parents chose his initials, AMDG, for Ad maiorem Dei gloriam. He boarded at Ampleforth, the Benedictine school in Yorkshire. His first solo exhibition, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1981, included Natural Selection, a ten-metre row of tools, fruit, weapons and vegetables encased in lead. He then began making plaster moulds of his own body and sealing them in lead, in works such as Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage and the single body-cases Plateau, Night and Peer.
Bed, of 1981, was bought by the Tate, Sound II stands in the crypt of Winchester Cathedral, and Iron: Man was made for Victoria Square in Birmingham in 1993. Event Horizon, a multipart installation, opened in London in 2007 and went on to Madison Square in New York, São Paulo and Hong Kong. He has been a Royal Academician since 2003 and was a British Museum trustee from 2007 to 2015. In 2011 his set for Babel (Words) at Sadler's Wells, made with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet, won an Olivier Award, and he received the Praemium Imperiale in 2013.
Best auction results
- A Case for an Angel I £5.3m
- Sculpture, 1989 · London · 6 October 2017
- Publicly reported
- The artist's auction record.
- Angel of the North (maquette) £3.4m
- Sculpture · London · 14 October 2011
- Publicly reported
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
