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
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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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.
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.
