Time Horizon: Antony Gormley’s 100 Life-Size Sculptures at Houghton Hall in Norfolk

Antony Gormley, Time Horizon, 2006, cast iron, 100 elements, each 189 × 53 × 29 cm. Installation Houghton Hall, Norfolk, 2024. Photographed by Pete Huggins.

Time Horizon, one of Antony Gormley's most spectacular large-scale installations, is on show at Houghton Hall in Norfolk until 31 October 2024, the first time the work has been shown in the UK.

Featuring 100 life-size sculptures, the works are distributed across 300 acres of the park, the furthest away being approximately 1.5 miles on the West Avenue.  The cast-iron sculptures, each weighing 620kg and standing at an average of 191cm, are installed at the same datum level to create a single horizontal plane across the landscape. 

Antony Gormley, Time Horizon, 2006, cast iron, 100 elements, each 189 × 53 × 29 cm. Installation Houghton Hall, Norfolk, 2024. Photographed by Pete Huggins.

Some works are buried, allowing only a part of the head to be visible, while others are buried to the chest or knees according to the topography.  Only occasionally do they stand on the existing surface.  Around a quarter of the works are placed on concrete columns that vary from a few centimetres high to rising four meters off the ground.

Antony Gormley, Time Horizon, 2006, cast iron, 100 elements, each 189 × 53 × 29 cm. Installation Houghton Hall, Norfolk, 2024. Photograph by Theo Christelis.

Antony Gormley is one of the most important artists of his generation and is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space.  His work has been exhibited throughout the UK and internationally.

 Antony Gormley, Time Horizon, 2006, cast iron, 100 elements, each 189 × 53 × 29 cm. Installation Houghton Hall, Norfolk, 2024. Photograph by Theo Christelis.

Antony Gormley said: ‘My ambition for this show is that people should roam far and wide.  Art has recently privileged the object rather than the experience that objects can initiate.  Time Horizon is not a picture, it is a field and you are in it.  The work puts the experience of the subject/visitor/protagonist on an equal footing with all material presences, organic and inorganic.  The quality of the light, the time of the year, the state of the weather and the condition of your mind, body and soul are all implicated in the field, as is all the evidence within it of human activity already accomplished as well as the plethora of life forms that surround the hall.’

Lord Cholmondeley, owner of Houghton Hall, said: ‘It has been an extraordinary experience witnessing the installation of 100 life-size sculptures in the historic landscape surrounding the house. It is a great privilege to have the opportunity to show this large-scale work by Antony Gormley for the first time in the UK.  We hope visitors will enjoy exploring Houghton and the interesting dynamic between Time Horizon and our exhibition of Magdalene Odundo's ceramic and glass work, which will open in May.’

Antony Gormley, Time Horizon, 2006, cast iron, 100 elements, each 189 × 53 × 29 cm. Installation Houghton Hall, Norfolk, 2024. Photographed by Pete Huggins.

Houghton Hall was built by Sir Robert Walpole, Great Britain’s first Prime Minister, in around 1722.  Designed by prominent Georgian architects Colen Campbell and James Gibbs, it is one of the country’s finest examples of Palladian architecture.  Houghton and its estate passed to the Cholmondeley family at the end of the 18th Century and remains a family home.  The house and award-winning gardens have been open to the public since 1976.

Antony Gormley, Time Horizon, 2006, cast iron, 100 elements, each 189 × 53 × 29 cm. Installation Houghton Hall, Norfolk, 2024. Photograph by Theo Christelis.

The Houghton Arts Foundation continues to build a collection of contemporary art at Houghton including a number of site-specific commissions.  With links to colleges and public institutions across the region, the Foundation’s aim is for Houghton to become a focus for those who wish to see great art of our time in a historic setting.  The 2024 exhibitions by Antony Gormley and Magdalene Odundo follow those by James Turrell (2015), Richard Long (2017), Damien Hirst (2018), Henry Moore (2019), Anish Kapoor (2020), Tony Cragg (2021), Chris Levine (2021) and Sean Scully (2023).

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Antony Gormley Biography
Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.

Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at Musée Rodin, Paris (2023); Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg (2022); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (2022); National Gallery Singapore, Singapore (2021); Schauwerk Sindelfingen, Sindelfingen (2021); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); Delos, Greece (2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2019); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2019); Long Museum, Shanghai (2017); National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Forte di Belvedere, Florence (2015); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2014); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia (2012); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2012); The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1993) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (1989). Permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Inside Australia (Lake Ballard, Western Australia), Exposure (Lelystad, the Netherlands), Chord (MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA) and Alert (Imperial College London, England).

Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007, the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2013. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year’s Honours list in 2014. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003.

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950.

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Courtesy of Antony Gormley