The exhibition of a single work in eight randomly orientated parts identified the taut line between the body's ability to express freedom through extension, and architecture's compulsion to contain. Occupying the corners of the exhibition space at White Cube Hoxton Square, where the ceiling and floor meet the walls (a place of oblivion and punishment), Gormley reinstated the body as the locus of lived experience, reinventing the room as an arena and the body itself as a battleground between inheritance and aspiration.

Never has his body been more exposed, the lines of the casting process more tensely indexing the internal contraction of the solar plexus and extension of the limbs, nor the surface more legible in its declaration that the work issues from a lived moment. Through testing the body to its limit the work evokes a physical intelligence that has been seen as sadomasochistic or as evidence of a spiritual struggle to allow liminal experience to become palpable, a struggle in which the viewer is inevitably implicated.