Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley occupies an unusual position as a highly populist sculptor - known chiefly for his Angel of the North (1998), a national landmark in the UK - who is also widely regarded as one of the most intellectually challenging artists working internationally. He is grounded in archaeology and anthropology, and looks to Asian and Buddhist traditions as much as to Western sculptural history, which he believes reached a punctuation point with Rodin. This is the first book to focus on Gormley's thoughts on sculpture, positioning his career and artistic philosophy in relation to its history. The book is structured thematically over four chapters: the first explores Gormley's thoughts on the body, time and space in relation to major works including European Field (1993) and 'Still Standing' (2011), Gormley's rehang of the classical rooms at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The second chapter, 'Sculptors', was first delivered as a series of five lectures for the BBC; in each, Gormley discusses a sculpture he considers to be of huge creative importance: Epstein's The Rock Drill (1913-15), Brancusi's The Endless Column (1935-38), Giacometti's La Place (1948-49), Joseph Beuys's Plight (1985) and Richard Serra's The Matter of Time (2005). In the third chapter, Gormley outlines the influence of Buddhist and Jain sculpture on his work and ideas, and the fourth showcases the artist's most recent sculptures.

In this wide-ranging, thought-provoking and sometimes provocative new book, leading sculptor Antony Gormley, informed and energised by a lifetime of making, and art critic and historian Martin Gayford, explore sculpture as a transnational art form with its own compelling history. The authors' lively conversations and explorations make unexpected connections across time and media. Sculpture has been practised by every culture throughout the world and stretches back into our distant past. The first surviving shaped stones may even predate the advent of language. Evidently, the desire to carve, mould, bend, chip away, weld, suspend, balance - to transform a vast array of materials and light into new shapes and forms - runs deep in our psyche and is a fundamental part of our human journey and need for expression. With more than 300 spectacular illustrations, Shaping the World juxtaposes a rich variety of works - from the famous Lowenmensch or Lion Man, c. 35,000 BCE to Michelangelo's luminous Pieta in Rome, the Terracotta Warriors in China to Rodin's The Kiss, Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, Olafur Eliasson's extraordinary Weather Project and Kara Walker's Fons Americanus, and Tomas Saraceno's ongoing Aerocene project, as well as examples of Gormley's own work. Antony Gormley and Martin Gayford take into account materials and techniques, and consider overarching themes such as light, mortality and our changing world. Above all, they discuss their view of sculpture as a form of physical thinking capable of altering the way people feel, and they invite us to look at sculpture we encounter - and more broadly the world around us - in a completely different way.