SPOLETO FESTIVAL USA UNVEILS OFFICIAL 2014 POSTER FEATURING WORK BY TURNER PRIZE-WINNING ARTIST SIR ANTONY GORMLEY

          CHARLESTON, SC (April 10, 2014)—A work entitled New York VIII by British artist Sir Antony Gormley was unveiled as the 2014 official poster image for the Spoleto Festival USA by General Director Nigel Redden today. Each year the 17-day international performing arts festival held in Charleston, South Carolina features an artwork as its core poster image, also to be used as the program book cover. Over the Festival’s 38-year history, these posters have showcased a broad range of influential artists such as Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, Sol LeWitt, Henry Moore, Susan Rothenberg, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, and Frank Stella among others.  

          Widely known for his public sculptural works such as Angel of the North in Gateshead in the UK, Another Place on Crosby Beach in Liverpool and his Event Horizon installations of life-size figures in central London and New York City, Gormley was awarded the UK’s high profile Turner Prize in 1994 and was knighted in the 2014 New Year’s Honours for services to the arts.

          His work is frequently centered around the human form, and although he often uses himself as a mold and model, Gormley has said that his works are not autobiographical or representational, but rather speak about the human experience and how the physical body has a relation to the external space within which it exists as well as to the inner space it contains.  

          This theme is represented in New York VIII, a carbon, casein, and aniline dye-on-paper work that is part of his 1997-1998 New York Drawings series. Of these drawings, made in the famed Dakota building, contemporary art historian Anna Moszynska has written: “The particular rhythm of the city’s architecture seems to activate the composition of the grid and creates new possibilities for the interpenetration of body and space.”  

          Human forms were also central to Gormley’s 1991 installations for the Spoleto Festival USA’s Places with a Past exhibition that featured site-specific art in locations around Charleston and was described by Michael Benson in The New York Times as “…the most moving and original exhibition of contemporary art in the United States this season.”  Gormley’s work was featured at the Old City Jail and included Field, which featured 20,000 terracotta fired figures filling a room on the second floor.   

          “This image for the 2014 poster conjures up the spirit of wonder and exploration that is so much a part of Spoleto Festival USA,” says Redden. “Like many of Gormley’s works, it enables viewers to create their own interpretation on whether the figure is looking at us or if we are looking at it, reflecting the experience of the best Festival performances that not only give us something to watch, but that can also change us from within. I am honored to feature an artist who participated in our Places with a Past exhibit and whose work for that show remains so vivid in my memory and, I am sure, in the memory of many others.”  

          The official Festival poster is available for purchase by phone at 843.579.3100 or at the Box Office at the Charleston Visitor Center, 375 Meeting Street. The price is $25. A gallery of past posters available for sale is available online at spoletousa.org.