LONDON.- 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 take us beyond the conventional boundaries of what is usually labelled ‘sculpture’ as they 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: Sculpture from Pre-History to Now juxtaposes a rich variety of works – from the famous Löwenmensch or Lion Man, c. 35,000 BCE to Michelangelo’s luminous Pietà 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 Tomás 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.

Antony Gormley is a distinguished British artist and sculptor perhaps best known for his Angel of the North, Another Place and Field. The human body is a central theme in his work, emerging out of his engagement with archaeology, anthropology and Asian and Buddhist thought, as much as out of Western sculptural tradition.

Martin Gayford is art critic for The Spectator. His books include Modernists & Mavericks, Man with a Blue Scarf, A Bigger Message, Rendez-vous with Art (with Philippe de Montebello), A History of Pictures (with David Hockney) and, most recently, The Pursuit of Art, all published by Thames & Hudson.

‘The origins of making physical objects goes back before the advent of Homo sapiens, earlier even than the appearance of our Neanderthal cousins. Sculpture emerges from material culture. At the beginning there was an urge to make objects and you could argue that making them was the catalyst for the emergence of the modern mind.’ Antony Gormley

‘Antony Gormley and I first began talking about sculpture at the end of the earth. Literally so, it was at Santiago de Compostela, near Cape Finisterre, where he had an exhibition in 2002. It was a suitable place for our conversations to start: a granite-built city with a superbly carved Romanesque cathedral. We’ve reconvened at intervals over eighteen years, and intensively for the last two’. Martin Gayford