The eminent British sculptor Sir Antony Gormley has praised Malta’s ambition in promoting international contemporay art, during a tour of the Malta International Contemporary Arts Space in Floriana.

“I’ve never been to Malta before and to see a place that’s so obviously confident about its place in the world and what it can contribute to the future in terms of culture, and that is so clear about its vision to give space to contemporary creativity… is a wonderful thing,” Sir Antony told TVM News in an interview.

Sir Antony reflected on MICAS’s ability to integrate the historical heritage of the 17th century Floriana Lines with the creativity of the modern intervention of the MICAS Galleries on the former Ospizio complex.

As part of his Malta tour, Sir Antony also viewed the megalithic temples at Ġgantija, in Gozo.

“I was amazed,” Sir Antony said in an interview at MICAS. “I was amazed at this kind of vision of these people of 6,000 years ago, that had the creative urge to make a place that would last for millennia in which people could think about now, about the future and about their relationship to place. And in a way this place that is standing next to us is doing the same thing.”

Sir Antony also praised the diverse range of artists who have contributed to Malta’s contemporary art scene, referring to both Joana Vasconcelos – whose exhibition Transcending the Domestic kicked off MICAS’s artistic programme – and Conrad Shawcross, whose collection of works are installed at MICAS.

“These are amazing artists to have to kick the whole institution off, because it’s so full of joy, so full of collaboration and so open to interpretation. You can say ‘here is an artist that really believes that human creativity and the creativity of all living things are part of the same urge of life trying to express itself’.”

Antony Gormley (born August 30, 1950, London, England) is a sculptor best known for his work with human forms, which he created chiefly from casts of his own naked body. With these artworks, Gormley examined aspects of the human presence in the world, often employing more than one figure placed within a landscape or cityscape.

In 1994, he won the Turner Prize for contemporary art for a group of figural installations created under his direction.

In the early 1980s Gormley was drawn to examine questions of humanity in relation to the environment. He made his first whole-body casts for Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage in 1981. As he continued, he varied materials and positions – crouching, standing, kneeling, lying down – sometimes distorting the human figure by elongating the arms, or replacing human features with other objects, such as putting a cast beam where the head should be. As gallery goers paused to examine the sculptures, they themselves seemed to be both the observers and the observed.

Gormley’s gift for the unsettling took another turn when he began to place his naked life-size figures out-of-doors. Natural environments enhanced the fragility of the human form and somehow changed the philosophical questions that Gormley’s works evoked. For Another Place (1997; at Crosby in Merseyside, England), for example, Gormley placed 100 cast-iron figures facing out to sea over a 2-mile (3.2-kilometre) stretch of beach. For 6 Times (2010; in Edinburgh), he placed six figures along the Water of Leith, four of them partly submerged in the water, one partly buried on land, and the sixth standing at the end of an old pier, facing the sea.

Until his works of the 21st century, Gormley was perhaps best known for the enormous Angel of the North (1998; near Gateshead, England), some 65 feet (20 metres) high and having a 175-foot (54-metre) span.

He was created an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1997 and was included in the New Year Honours List for 2014 as a knight bachelor. In addition, Gormley was made a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2003, and he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for sculpture in 2013.