Art@Site www.artatsite.com Antony Gormley Angel of the North Tyne and Wear
Artist:

Antony Gormley

Title:

Angel of the North

Year:
1998
Adress:
Gateshead
Website:
Superseding
In the distance stands an impressive artwork. The climax builds up due the large distance and the climb up the hill. Closer and closer we see the immense wide wings. By the various spaces between the verticals the wings seem to be even wider. Close by we see the athletic human figure with a broad chest and thick calves.
Sporadically I dream that I can fly. This happens at special moments when I overcome a big problem. Than I feel my life is under control again. An wonderful and addictive experience.
This is exactly what Gormley visualized. But in a superseding way.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com

Vertaling
Overtreffend
In de verte staat een indrukwekkend kunstwerk. De climax bouwt zich op door de grote afstand en het beklimmen van de heuvel. Dichterbij zien we de immens brede vleugels. Door de verschillende afstanden tussen de verticalen lijken de vleugels n g breder. Dichtbij gekomen zien we het atletische mensfiguur met een brede borstkas en dikke kuiten.
Sporadisch droom ik dat ik kan vliegen. Dit gebeurt op bijzondere momenten dat ik grote problemen heb overwonnen. Dat ik mijn leven weer onder controle heb. Een geweldige en verslavende ervaring.
Dit is precies wat Gormley verbeeldt. Maar dan op een overtreffende manier.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com

www.gateshead.gov.uk:
The sculpture was designed by internationally renowned sculptor Antony Gormley.
Antony Gormley OBE, who was born in 1950, is at the forefront of a generation of celebrated British artists who emerged during the 1980s. He has exhibited work around the world and has major public works in the USA, Japan, Australia, Norway and Eire. Public work in Britain can be seen in locations as diverse as the crypt at Winchester Cathedral and Birmingham city centre. In 1994 he won the prestigious Turner Prize and in 1997 was awarded the OBE for services to sculpture. He has exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Gallery, British Museum and the Henry Moore Sculpture Gallery in Leeds.
"People are always asking, why an angel? The only response I can give is that no-one has ever seen one and we need to keep imagining them. The angel has three functions - firstly a historic one to remind us that below this site coal miners worked in the dark for two hundred years, secondly to grasp hold of the future, expressing our transition from the industrial to the information age, and lastly to be a focus for our hopes and fears - a sculpture is an evolving thing." Gormley said of the Angel: "The hilltop site is important and has the feeling of being a megalithic mound. When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site, there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now in the light, there is a celebration of this industry. The face will not have individual features. The effect of the piece is in the alertness, the awareness of space and the gesture of the wings - they are not flat, they're about 3.5 degrees forward and give a sense of embrace. The most important thing is that this is a collaborative venture. We are evolving a collective work from the firms of the North East and the best engineers in the world. www.wikipedia.org:
The Angel, like much of Gormley's other work, is based on a cast of his own body It s sheer size and dominance over the surrounding landscape allows for an artistic impact on a large audience.
The steel sculpture is 208 tonnes, 20 metres (66 ft) tall, with wings measuring 54 metres (177 ft) across. It s wingspan is often compared to that of a Boeing 757 jet, which is actually smaller. The wings are 6.2 metres (20 ft) high at the point where they join the body.
It is defined by a rusty, oxidised colour which comes from the corten weathering steel material which, despite being distinctive, does not contrast harshly with the nearby environment. Inspired by this colour, Gormley had originally intended to call the sculpture The Iron Angel of the North.
The wings are angled 3.5 degrees forward to create, according to Gormley, "a sense of embrace". They are regular and symmetrical in shape, which contrast with the asymmetrical body.

www.wikipedia.org:
Gormley commented on this historic connection, saying "When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site, there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now, in the light, there is a celebration of this industry." The sculpture faces south, facing the traffic travelling north into Gateshead and towards Tyneside. Historically, the nearby valley allowed for a convenient passage into Tyne and Wear from the south. Over time, this evolved into more established modern travel routes. Due to its proximity to the main road and rail line, it is estimated that 33 million people see the Angel every year, including those in the roughly 90,000 vehicles which pass each day. The statue can also been seen from nearby housing estates and commercial areas.
A plaque beside the angel contains a quotation from Gormley: "The hill top site is important and has the feeling of being a megalithic mound. When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site, there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark.... It is important to me that the Angel is rooted in the ground the complete antithesis of what an angel is, floating about in the ether. It has an air of mystery. You make things because they cannot be said. www.wikipedia.org:
Like many of Antony Gormley's sculptures, the Angel provokes questions about the relationship between art, politics, the environment, and society.
Gormley has commented on the choice of depicting an angel for the sculpture, suggesting that the image was multi-functional; as a reminder of the industrial history of the site, beneath which was a disused quarry where miners had worked for centuries; as a reference to the future, symbolising the transition from the industrial to the information age; and as a focus for human hopes and fears.
The Angel as conceived of by Gormley is therefore a symbol of hope rather than one of religion. Gormley also stated "People are always asking, why an angel? The only response I can give is that no-one has ever seen one and we need to keep imagining them." In comparing the modernity of the sculpture to historic concepts of angels, Gail-Nina Anderson remarked that the Angel of the North "is also an angel for the 1990s, a high-tech tribute to modern engineering in a period busy with amusing itself with fairies and angels, spirit-guides and reincarnations." www.buddhistinquiry.org:
Artists are those who pay attention more closely than the rest of us, and are often the first to understand and articulate cultural change. Exploring emptiness throughout the fields of modernist and contemporary arts is a fascinating exercise, which here I can only express with mere lists a collage of names and ideas.
Enough to say that in the modern era, barriers and foundational beliefs have fallen in every direction and artists have both instigated the destruction and imagined ways of reconstruction.
Mallarm challenged the meaning of the word, Rimbaud declared I is an other, composers challenged musical form, John Cage challenged the very conception of what constitutes music. In visual arts, first the perspective of the artist creator became fractured by cubism until pictures lost the need to be representative at all, and the fields of abstract then conceptual art opened up beyond the frame. The work itself and much that has been written by and about such artists as Rothko, Barnett Newman, Yves Klein, Giacometti, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Anthony Gormley, Anish Kapoor resonate with expressions of emptiness.
As the picture frame and the proscenium arch disappeared, so the audience of theatre and visual art is invited into the artwork. It becomes an experience, in the work of James Turell and Olafor Eliasson for example. Even in dance: one renowned contemporary choreographer is working with neuroscientists to explore kinaesthetic intelligence to try to help dancers evade habitude and create from unknowing.

www.wikipedia.org:
Sir Antony Mark David Gormley, Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), born 30 August 1950, is a British sculptor. His best known works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in Gateshead in the North of England, commissioned in 1994 and erected in February 1998, Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool, and Event Horizon, a multi-part site installation which premiered in London in 2007, around Madison Square in New York City, in 2010, in S o Paulo, Brazil, in 2012, and in Hong Kong in 2015 16.
In 2008 The Daily Telegraph ranked Gormley number 4 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
On 6 September 2015, Another Place saw its 10th anniversary at Crosby Beach in Liverpool. Talking of their 10th birthday.
I'm just delighted by the barnacles!
Every time I'm there, just like any other visitor, you're encouraged to linger a bit longer seeing the tide come in and how many of them disappear. And then you're encouraged to linger further until they're revealed again.

Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live.Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or "the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside.His work attempts to treat the body not as an object, but as a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. The work is not symbolic but indexical a trace of a real event of a real body in time.