Parallel Field - St Mary Axe, London, UK - Figurative Public Sculpture on Waymarking.com

The information plaque near to the sculpture tells us:

Parallel Field, 1990
Cast iron
192 x 46 x 35 cm (each figure)
Figure 1: 200kg
Figure 2: 161kg

This is one of Gormley's first castings in iron and indicates an objectified space, subject to gravity and to atmospheric pressure. These two exclusive, heavy, void, hermetic vessels are a foil to the flow of human bodies on the street.

Gormley's website tells us:

PARALLEL FIELD (1990) by Antony Gormley will be exhibited in Sculpture in the City, 2013, the acclaimed annual public realm sculpture exhibition held in the eastern part of the City of London. For 12 months, the exhibition will enliven the area's public spaces with artworks to be enjoyed by visitors, workers and residents.

This is one of Gormley's first castings in iron. It is part of a transitional phase in the early 1990s between making hollow lead bodycases and solid, iron bodyforms.

The works are made by taking a mould of Gormley's wrapped body and then putting layer after layer of plaster over that first mould until the form becomes a smooth shell. This relationship between a precise register of the topography of a particular body on the inside and a generalised casing on the outside or the tension between particular and universal has been explored in different ways at different times in the work. Manufacture becomes metaphor in the six threaded lugs that use the holes that held the core as hermetic seals of the internal space.

The work indicates a human space in space at large. It is an objectified space, subject to gravity and to atmospheric pressure.

The installation of the work puts these two exclusive hermetic vessels in the public domain in such a way as they become active; the fifteen degree lean making the inertia of these heavy, void, safe boxes react with the flow of human bodies that pass them. In the context of the City, Gormley hopes that this invitation to an awareness of context renders the field created by the work a scenario ripe for deconstruction.

His website tells us about him:

Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture in the 1970s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human being stands in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. Gormley's work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Rio di Janeiro and Brasilia (2012); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2012); The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1993) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (1989). He has also participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale (1982 and 1986) and Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany (1987). Permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Inside Australia (Lake Ballard, Western Australia) and Exposure (Lelystad, The Netherlands). Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007 and the Obayashi Prize in 2012. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year's Honours list in 2014.  He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003 and a British Museum Trustee since 2007. Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950.