Antony Gormley

Since the 1980s, when the English sculptor Antony Gormley (born 1950) first began casting figures from his own body in lead and iron, his principal concern has been opening up new artistic and social venues for the display of his work. In realizing his latest work, "Horizon Field," in Austria, the artist has installed 100 figures at an elevation of nearly 7,000 feet; the figures face every direction but never towards one another. The mountain landscape, with its beguiling mix of natural beauty, urbanity and the sociality of old valley communities, provides an ideal experimental field for Gormley's investigations into the relationship between nature and culture. Of this project, the artist said: "It asks basic questions: who are we, what are we, where do we come from and to where are we headed?" Photographs of the landscape installation are contextualized with images of the artist's previous works.