[1] His works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in Gateshead in the north of England, commissioned in 1994 and erected in February 1998; Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool; and Event Horizon, a multipart site installation which premiered in London in 2007, then subsequently in Madison Square in New York City (2010), São Paulo, Brazil (2012), and Hong Kong (2015–16).

Gormley was born in Hampstead, London, the youngest of seven children, to a German mother (maiden name Brauninger) and a father of Irish descent.

Gormley has stated that his parents chose his initials, "AMDG", to have the inference Ad maiorem Dei gloriam – "to the greater glory of God".

[4] When Gormley returned to England, and inspired by his time in India, he made one of his first artworks, Sleeping Place, by laying a plaster-soaked sheet over a friend.

Its hollow plaster shell hinted at the form of a body and recalled the people Gormley saw asleep in India wrapped in saris or dhotis.

In this exhibition, Gormley showed a series of works that were concerned with surfaces, skins and inner structures, such as Natural Selection, a ten metre row of objects, including tools, fruits, weapons and vegetables, encased in lead, and Room, an enclosure reminiscent of a barbed-wire fence made from a set of the artist's clothes.

I was trying to map out the phenomenology of the body and to find a new way of evoking it as being less a thing, more a place; a site of transformation, and an axis of physical and spatial experience.

Critic Howard Halle said that "Using distance and attendant shifts of scale within the very fabric of the city, [Event Horizon] creates a metaphor for urban life and all the contradictory associations – alienation, ambition, anonymity, fame – it entails.

in an episode that followed his team and him in their Kings Cross studio, preparing a new work – a group of 60 enormous steel figures – called Expansion Field.

[23] In 2015, at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence, Gormley presented a group of cast iron works that acted as points of ″acupuncture″ throughout the historical fortress.

In 2017, Gormley curated Inside, an exhibition at the Southbank Centre, London, presented by Koestler Trust showing artworks by prisoners, detainees, and ex-offenders.

Organised and commissioned by the NEON Organization and presented in collaboration with the Ephorate of Antiquities of Cyclades, this project marked the first time that an artist took over the archaeological site of Delos since the island was inhabited over 5,000 years ago, and is the first time a contemporary art installation has been unanimously approved by the Greek Archaeological Council of the Ministry of Culture to take place in Delos, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

[31] In 2020, Gormley was confirmed to be "lending" a sculpture to Kirklees College to sit atop its new building at Pioneer House in Dewsbury, as part of a major redevelopment in the town.

[citation needed] In 2023, Gormley opened a number of large-scale exhibitions, including Living Time at TAG Art Museum in Qingdao, China, and Critical Mass at Musée Rodin in Paris, France, which marked the first time that a living artist has been invited to exhibit in all areas of the museum, including the Hôtel Biron.

As part of the exhibition, Gormley showed his major artwork Critical Mass II, a sculpture comprising 60 cast iron bodies, in and around the museum and its grounds.

Later in the year, Gormley opened Body Politic at White Cube in London, a solo exhibition of new sculptures responding to themes of movement and containment, as well as the topic of migration.

As part of the exhibition, a new installation, Resting Place, filled a room with 244 bodies built from fired bricks, and a row of what the artist calls concrete "bunkers" ran down the gallery's central corridor.

This sculpture, made from slabs of Corten steel, celebrates the life and enduring influence of mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing.

This sculpture was made from horizontal and vertical aluminium bars that filled the room like "whiskers" and visitors were invited to enter and find their way through this space.

[42] While at the Slade School of Fine Art, Gormley met Vicken Parsons, who was to become his assistant, and in 1980, his wife, as well as a successful artist in her own right.

[44][45] Gormley is a patron of Paintings in Hospitals, a charity that provides art for health and social care in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.