LEEDS.- Harewood is showing two new works by internationally-renowned sculptor Antony Gormley in the Terrace Gallery until the end of October.

Earlier this season Harewood focused on Adam, Sir Jacob Epstein’s masterpiece, which stands in the Hall upstairs. Epstein was a key early influence on the development of Gormley’s art.

Gormley says: ‘I am delighted to have the opportunity to show two works at Harewood House, which has long been associated with Adam, Epstein’s powerful evocation of masculine yearning carved from a massive block of English alabaster.

‘My material is iron. Smelted and cast, it also engages with the block but uses the language of architecture to interpret the male human body as an unstable space made up of individual cells fused and propped together.

‘The room in which the works are shown is supported by four stone columns that make you aware of the load path of the building. I hope that these two works, in which columns and masses describe an unsteady vertical stack twisting through 90 degrees, will allow the viewer to feel and think about his or her own body as an unsteady vertical mass in space.’

For Gormley Epstein is a potent figure, the most radical sculptor working in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In contrast to the smooth, polished surface of the alabaster of Epstein's Adam, Gormley has used iron for Two States. In its rusted state, iron bears a resemblance to blood, but also connects to the Earth’s core. This is the material that gives this planet most of its mass but which is used in these two works to evoke the fragility of the human condition and its dependency on the built environment. The provisional stacked masses of the sculptures stand in contrast to the stone solidity of the House itself.

To accompany the exhibition in the Terrace Gallery, a new film documenting the making of the works has been commissioned including an exclusive interview with Antony Gormley.