A Study of the Contemporary Significance of Body in Antony Gormley’s Sculpture

• Main Authors: Ya-Ling Yang, 楊雅苓
• Other Authors: 廖仁義
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/xqa872

碩士 === 國立臺北藝術大學 === 美術史研究所 === 97 === Ａntony Gormley（1950 ~） is one of the most active contemporary sculptors, who traveled through the middle East to learn the Vipassana Meditation in India. This experience affected the way he perceived and treated a body. Therefore, the question of the space that the body occupies played an important part in his works, and he proceeded to explore this aspect of the body in his works from 1972 onwards. In the meantime, he explored not only the state of a body in the world but also the relationship between an individual and a group in the society in his works. For him, making a sculpture is a way to think of how to pass the message of human experience in the frame of a body in the world. How did Gormley try to embody the idea of being by using the body in his sculptures? How did he try to explain invisible thought by visible artwork? What kind of being did he try to expound and analyze? For Gormley, the process of creating art is like a series of questions and answers which philosophers are searching for. The development of theories about the body affected the esthetics in the 20th century. As a result, the body became an active place of creativity. This new translation of the body led to the preferred perspective of esthetics. In this thesis, I will focus on Gormley’s sculptures. I try to analyze Gormley’s works with the view of understanding a body in the contemporary art world. From the discourse of body display to the body metaphor, we can understand how the artist presents his idea of life by representing and interpreting a body. In the research of Antony Gormley, I hope to find out the possibility of presenting the body in contemporary sculptures to examine the state of body and to understand how we get conscious of our bodies through Gormley’s sculptures.