ROMChannel

ROM Contemporary Culture presents the eighth annual Eva Holtby Lecture on November 20, 2013, moderated by art critic and journalist Sarah Milroy, former editor of Canadian Art magazine, and contributor for the Globe and Mail. In Art as Survival, London born sculptor, Antony Gormley will explore the central theme of art and creativity in human life. Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public art works, including the Angel of the North that investigate the relationship between the human body and space. The artist will look at his own work and historical objects in consideration of art as a tool for survival in a time of global climate change.

Antony Gormley
U.K. artist Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950. He has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human being stands in relation to nature and the cosmos.  Gormley continually strives to identify the space of art as a space of becoming; in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.

Gormley has had a number of solo shows at venues including the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Hayward Gallery, London; Malmö Konsthall; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen. Major public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England) and Exposure (Lelystad, The Netherlands). He has also participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale and the Documenta 8, Kassel Germany. Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 and was made an Officer of the British Empire in 1997. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and since 2007 a British Museum Trustee.