Antony Gormley Quotes

Art has to change things, and if it was immediately acceptable it would not be doing the job.

We are not moving towards some kind of goal. We are at the goal, and it is changing with us. If art has any purpose, it is to open our eyes to that fact.

Art is not about understanding, it's about experience.

I want to start where language ends.

We're not on a journey to a goal, the goal is with us changing with us.

I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.

Most big cities like London and Glasgow have great big rivers that are unmissable. What's brilliant about the Water of Leith is that it's so hidden. It's a secret.

Our appearance belongs to others, we live in the darkness of the body-part of all darkness but felt.

Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

Public money should be spent on art but through individuals not committees.

I want people to be excited about cooling towers and megasheds; they're as much part of our history as the rural barn.

I think scale is about, in a way, the apprehension of proportion, and all the proportions that mean things to us as human beings are related to the body.

It is a depressing business talking to journalist.

I think critics are very useful. But I think that they, in a way, betray their position when they stop people looking for themselves.

The elemental world we all live in is the darkness of the body.

'6 Times' is an attempt to reinvestigate the social responsibility of sculpture. The body in question is a particular body, but it doesn't really matter whose it is.

I would say that the whole way that I have approached the body is as a space, not a thing - not an object to be improved, idealised or whatever, but simply to be dwelt in.

Art is the means by which we communicate what it feels like to be alive - in the past, that was mixed up with other illustrative duties, but that was still its central function that has been liberated in the art called modern.

If your work doesn't speak to people, it's beyond comprehension and risible, but if people engage with it, you become tarred with the brush of populism.

It's wonderful to see art in a museum, but it is institutionalised. I don't like the idea of the artwork as something that requires special conditions. I would like it to be universal.

Maybe this is a utopian view of art but I do believe that art can function as a vehicle, that it isn't just a cultural pursuit, something that happens in art galleries. Unless art is linked to experience and the fear and joy of that, it becomes mere icing on the cake.

Western Australia is covered by granite, the largest single piece of Achaean rock that still lies on the surface of the, of, of the Earth, that's 2.5 to 2.9 billion years old. It's one of the most ancient and intact bits of the Earth's crust.

I would like to go to Kalimantan island in Sumatra to see the carvings and longhouse sculptures. I've also always wanted to look at the wood carvings along the Sepik River in New Guinea.

There is no question that creative intelligence comes not through learning things you find in books or histories that have already been written, but by focusing on and giving value to experience as it happens.

Due to the failure of politics, which has become a process of middle-management, art has become one of the last open spaces to question core beliefs and to design a viable future. Art becomes an open space where we can ask fundamental questions about ourselves.

The making of a whole person and the creation of true individuals can only happen by singing and dancing and making art.

The very first lead work that I made is called 'Land Sea and Air,' and is the enclosure of primal elements within that kind of carapace of lead.

It doesn't matter if you can't speak the same language. If you have pictures, or better still, if you can draw things, then you can communicate anything to anyone.

I think that the equator could act as a great equalizer for all life on Earth, celebrated as the great energy belt of the planet. If all our energy grids were synchronized, the light side of the planet could provide energy for the dark side, according to the movement of the sun.