Artist Gormley is selling his bodies for £1.35 million

Now Antony Gormley has recreated that vast work Event Horizon within a single room and renamed it Lost Horizon. Any connoisseur with £1.35 million to spare can snap up 32 of his 700kg cast-iron statues modelled on six poses of his own body.

But they come in a distinct arrangement - hanging from the walls and ceiling as well as standing on the floor of the White Cube gallery in Mayfair.

Gormley described it as "an inversion of Event Horizon ... this is turning the world inside so that all of these bodies that before searched to the edge of where the perceivable meets the imperceivable, here these are all very much in our space".

He added: "Anyone who thinks these are some kind of surrogate statues is barking up the wrong tree. They are all levers on space that make you experience your being in space." More prosaicallythe logistics were considerable-Gormley said: "We had to put two tons of steel in the walls. This gallery looked like a Gruyere cheese a week ago because it was more holes than room." Downstairs Gormley has created a second work, Firmament, priced at £850,000. Also based on his own body it was designed with engineering expertise from Arup and looks like a giant Meccano puzzle. Bodies have long been a feature of Gormley's work, most famously in the giant Angel of the North in Gateshead.

He mocked himself as he predicted the comment today: "They're the same old bods." He admitted he feared one consequence of the Angel was that councils now thought throwing money at large public artworks was the key to regeneration.

"I think there's an awful lot of crap out there," he said. The Meeting Place statue - two embracing lovers - at St Pancras station was an example.

Britain needed a proper structure run by experts - such as in Holland and Germany - who made sure that such commissions were worth it.

But he still approves of the aspiration of public art. "I want to make work that truly is everyone's," he said.

He is one of six artists bidding to be the next on the Fourth Plinth inTrafalgar Square. He has proposed a rolling programme of real people each standing for an hour on the plinth.

"The public response has been absolutely extraordinary. That reinforces my view that when people feel that in some way they are invited to inhabit the space of art, they take up that invitation with alacrity."