Antony Gormley (b. 1950)

The human body in its broadest sense is Gormley's language. His meditations on its physical reality and its spiritual and philosophical dimensions are some of the best-known sculptural landmarks in the UK.

In this tiny silver sculpture of a foetus, Gormley has isolated the moment of development where it takes on a human existence; all the basic organs in their nascent form have coalesced to become a potential human being. Interestingly, this piece is one of the few not cast from Gormley's own body or elaborated from moulds of it: he modelled in clay his own imagined prenatal features.