Antony Gormley calls Brexit ‘the biggest act of self-harm this country has ever played on itself’

Sir Antony Gormley has called Brexit the “biggest act of self-harm this country has ever played on itself” in a withering condemnation of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union.

The acclaimed artist took aim at the Conservatives for trying to destroy the “creative, collective project” which found a way of putting “Europe back together after two devastating world wars”, ahead of his latest exhibition, Time Horizon.

Highlighting the failures of Britain’s post-Brexit arrangements, he said: “I think of all the things we have lost, from Erasmus scholarships to all those musicians and artists who can no longer travel freely between Britain and Europe.”

London-born Sir Antony, known for using his own body to create metal castings – including his famous 20-metre tall Angel of the North sculpture in Gateshead – also advocated in favour of art schools, previously describing the making of images as a “fundamental human need”.

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In an interview with The Times, the artist called the collapse of arts education in this country a “betrayal” and “tragic.”

“There has been something like a 40 per cent reduction in people wanting to study art history or archaeology or art at secondary level.

“If we are not renewing the sources of creativity – be it singing, playing an instrument, dancing, it doesn’t matter what – how can we bring new forms into the world? We are all going to become slaves of AI; managers of late capitalism. We wouldn’t have got The Beatles without Liverpool College of Art,” he said.

When asked what a new government should do, he said art must not be sidelined in schools. “Politicians come and go, but what defines our hopes, fears and values is the art we produce. That will be remembered long after we’re all gone.”

Sir Antony started his career at the Slade School of Fine Art, which he attended after spending time on the hippy trail to Afghanistan, and two years in India, where he at one point slept on the streets of Calcutta. This experience led to his first sculpture: a homeless figure made from plaster and linen.

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Later works included the iconic Angel of the North in Gateshead, which drew on Christian iconography influenced by a devout Catholic upbringing.

His new exhibition, Time Horizon, features human figures spread over 300 acres at Houghton Hall, a Georgian stately home in Norfolk which is home to David Rocksavage and Rose Hanbury, the Marquess and Marchioness of Cholmondeley.

Speaking on the themes of his latest work, Gormley said: “In this ever more divided world, between rich and poor, between the 1 per cent and the rest, where does justice come in?”

The sculptures bear a resemblance to his famous Crosby beach installation, Another Place.

Gormley has a long history of blending art and politics. In a letter in The Guardian in 2019, he said that he would vote Labour in the 2019 general election because he was “tired of Boris Johnson’s blustery rhetoric, lazy policymaking and mendacious, cuddly Churchill act”.

open image in gallery

In June 2022, he applied for German citizenship, which he is entitled to through his mother, after describing Brexit as a “disaster” and a “betrayal”.

In March of this year, the artist issued an excoriating attack on the UK government’s attitude towards art, stating on an episode of The Rest is Politics podcast that this “terrible government” has “consistently undermined art both in education and in the support of our institutions”.

Sir Antony had a middle-class upbringing in Hampstead Garden Suburb. He attended Ampleforth College, a Benedictine boarding school in Yorkshire, before reading archaeology, anthropology, and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1968 to 1971 and then attending Saint Martin’s School of Art and Goldsmiths in London.

Time Horizon will run at Houghton Hall in Norfolk from 21 April to 31 October.