Speaking about this exhibition, Gormley stated:

‘For this exhibition I have used two ‘old’ works to make a new one.

All works take on a new feeling and speak differently in a new context but also each new work you make, if it has any guts at all, radically challenges everything that has been made before. So here we have a dialogue between two works made almost ten years apart that will perhaps destroy each other.

One was made as a testimony to the body as a place that seems to have lost its place: the space of the body as a lost object. Nevertheless, here it is absolutely present in its dark mass and in the demands it makes on us. The other is a shimmering nervousness in which the body gives itself up to light. 

 II (1995) was made as an ironic charade of the ascent of man by one actor - me - and 

 (2003) calls on the collective body and field theory.

What are they, together and apart? I hope they are different ways of infecting but also of involving architecture and the viewer in a new reflexivity of inhabitation. I hope they call on memory and anticipation. I hope they make us not take standing up for granted: to stand is a privilege and to fall most natural.

Finally, this is an experiment in what representation without mimesis can do. How can art be instrumental?

I do not take the Gulbenkian for granted. I want to expose the architecture - make it as raw as the work, part of the work. I do not want it to be a shelter or a frame, but a condition, which, like that of the viewer, is tested and made porous.’

Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian

, 2003, 4.76 mm square section stainless steel bar, various sizes: 287 elements, derived from moulds of local inhabitants of Newcastle-Gateshead aged 2.5 - 84 years.

, 1995, cast iron, 60 life-size elements; variable sizes. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

, 1991. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

, 1991, concrete, 74.5 × 62.5 × 60 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

, 1981, rubber, 0.6 × 122 × 134 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

, 1991, lead, fibreglass, plaster, air and optical lens, 213 × 74 × 51 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

, 1985, lead, plaster, fibreglass, clay and air, 54 × 56 × 208 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

 1986-87, lead, fibreglass, wood, plaster and air, 850 × 58 × 58 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

 1989/93 (foreground), lead, unit size: 3.5 × 1.1 cm diam and 

, 1991 (background), copper and plaster, 340 × 0.4 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

, 1988, lead, fibreglass and plaster, 192 × 155 × 38 cm. Photograph taken by Stephen White, London.

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