ANTONY GORMLEY'S SCULPTURE FLARE II COMES TO SALISBURY CATHEDRAL FROM 2 APRIL UNTIL SEPTEMBER 2012

ANTONY GORMLEY
FLARE II
Salisbury Cathedral from 2 April 2011 until 5 September 2012

The Chapter of Salisbury Cathedral is delighted to announce the installation of Antony Gormley’s FLARE II. The sculpture will be shown from 2 April 2011 for 18 months and will be suspended from the ceiling in the South Transept where it will be bathed in the light from the surrounding windows. The combination of medieval architecture and contemporary art will provide an inspiring and illuminating experience for all those who visit Salisbury.

Antony Gormley has said of FLARE II: “In order to express the human state of embodiment less as a thing or a narrative than a state I have tried to make the space of the body open to light, to the gaze and to space at large. The act of sustained and materialised imagination of Salisbury Cathedral and the volume and transparency of the South Transept is a wonderful context for this work.”

FLARE II, 2008, 2 mm square section stainless steel wire, 300 x 210 x 216 cm

Antony Gormley
In a career spanning nearly 40 years, Antony Gormley has made sculpture that explores the relation of the human body to space at large, explicitly in large-scale installations like Another Place, Domain Field and Inside Australia, and implicitly in works such as Clearing, Breathing Room and Blind Light where the work becomes a frame through which the viewer becomes the viewed. By using his own existence as a test ground, Gormley’s work transforms a site of subjective experience into one of collective projection. Increasingly, the artist has taken his practice beyond the gallery, engaging the public in active participation, as in Clay and the Collective Body (Helsinki) and the One & Other commission in Trafalgar Square. Gormley’s work has been exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with solo shows at the Whitechapel, Serpentine, Tate, Hayward Gallery, British Museum and White Cube as well as Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), Malmö Konsthall (Sweden), National Museum of Modern Chinese History (Beijing), Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (Mexico City) and Kunsthaus Bregenz (Austria). Major public works include Angel of the North (Gateshead), Another Place (Crosby Beach, Liverpool) and Habitat (Anchorage, USA).

Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999 and the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007. He was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) in 1997 and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Trinity College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003 and a British Museum Trustee since 2007.

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950.

Salisbury Cathedral

Built between 1220 and 1258, Salisbury Cathedral is acknowledged as one of the world’s most beautiful buildings. It has the tallest spire (123 m) in Britain and the best-preserved copy of the Magna Carta (A.D. 1215). Each year, nearly half a million people visit the Cathedral for services, concerts, educational events, the arts programme and for sight seeing. The installation of FLARE II will be the most recent project in Salisbury Cathedral to explore the worlds of faith and art. The Cathedral is open daily to visitors and worshippers and looks forward to FLARE II being a part of Cathedral life for the next eighteen months.