{"id":217416,"date":"2025-06-27T02:07:13","date_gmt":"2025-06-27T02:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/217416\/"},"modified":"2025-06-27T02:07:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T02:07:13","slug":"what-is-that-angel-sculpture-in-28-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/217416\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is That Angel Sculpture in ’28 Years Later’?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn addition to a host of ravenous zombies and a fractured Scottish family, 28 Years Later features one of the most famous public artworks in the UK: Antony Gormley<\/a>\u2018s Angel of the North, a 1998 sculpture that towers above the A1 roadway near Gateshead.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Cor-Ten steel sculpture takes the form of a figure who stands 66 feet tall and spreads its 177-foot-long wings. It\u2019s thought to be seen by millions of people annually and has become a calling card for Gormley, a Turner Prize\u2013winning sculptor due to receive his biggest US survey to date in the fall, at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\n\tAngel of the North has rusted over since its debut, and its oxidized surface comes to take on a post-apocalyptic feel in 28 Years Later, where it appears in an overgrown field, having been abandoned amid failed attempts to curtail a rage-inducing virus that has run rampant in England. <\/p>\n

\n\tGormley\u2019s sculpture rhymes with 28 Years Later\u2019s fascination with spirituality\u2014director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland set the opening set piece partly within a church\u2014but it\u2019s also enlisted by the filmmakers in their critique of conservative British politics. (Such a critique may appear oblique to some, but within the UK, few have missed the point. We won\u2019t spoil the out-of-left-field ending<\/a>, which makes explicit reference to a certain British celebrity who was posthumously accused of rape.)<\/p>\n

\n\tOn its face, Angel of the North does not seem so scandalous. Gormley said he intended the work as a tribute to the miners who once worked in the area where the sculpture is now sited. \u201cWhen you think of the mining that was done underneath the site,\u201d he once said, \u201cthere is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now, in the light, there is a celebration of this industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in a 2019 New York Times interview<\/a>, Gormley said that the work was actually a rebuttal of the policies of Margaret Thatcher, a Conservative prime minister whom the artist said had made it seem as though \u201ceverything that had come out of the Industrial Revolution\u201d was \u201cover.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe work was initially controversial, not for responding to Thatcherite politics but for its look, with many local politicians claiming it was an eyesore. Jewish residents of the surrounding area also said the work reminded them of German aircrafts<\/a>, leading Gormley to be labeled a Nazi by certain outlets.<\/p>\n

\n\tMore recently, however, Angel of the North has found itself at the center of a different hot-button debate: the conversation that preceded the 2016 vote on Brexit. That year, the anti\u2013European Union group Vote Leave projected the words \u201cVote Leave Take Control\u201d across the angel\u2019s wingspan. That moved Gormley himself to send a letter<\/a> to Vote Leave in which he said that the stunt implied a \u201cfalse endorsement\u201d on his part of the group\u2019s cause.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a statement on his website, Gormley writes that Angel of the North was the product of \u201ca focus for collective hope\u201d\u2014something not notably possible in 28 Years Later, in which quarantine acts as a parallel for post-Brexit isolationism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In addition to a host of ravenous zombies and a fractured Scottish family, 28 Years Later features one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217417,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[86116,4021,4020,4022,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-217416","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-antony-gormley","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114752890109460422","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}