One-trick pony or artistic pioneer? When it comes to the work of Antony Gormley you can’t help wondering, because ever since that monumental mannequin The Angel of the North put him – quite literally – on the map, he has been churning out variants of the same figurative sort. So you can expect the expected from Firmament, his latest show.

Does that matter? Probably not. Quite apart from the fact that if you like his pieces you can be pretty sure that you won’t be disappointed, the power of the recognition factor should not be underplayed. It has undoubtedly made him our most famous living sculptor and it enlivens his works like some celebrity buzz.

But that doesn’t mean that it will fizzle out with fashion. This sense of recognition operates also on another level. Gormley’s works are quite simply – even simplistically – about us: about the spaces and places that our bodies inhabit, about the presences and absences that we articulate. His figures may most famously be casts of his own form, but we are the subjects. And we can relate to that with the same visceral thrill as the toddler who recognises two dots and a line as a pair of eyes and a mouth.

Gormley’s new show comes after a Hayward Gallery exhibition that had to be extended by popular demand.

The artist now takes it farther. The striking “body forms” that for a few months stalked the skylines of London now come indoors in an installation called Lost Horizon. Fixed to floors, walls and ceiling, they turn the gallery into a sort of maze that the spectator must navigate, alert to his own body and its particular trajectory as he picks his path in relation to their cast-iron presences.

Downstairs a dimly lit basement gallery cramps a vast human form in its confines. Firmament, a huge reticulated structure, kicks out, pressing feet into corners, heaving shoulders against walls. It is as though a giant confined in a packing case is trying to shift his position. This “cell of little ease” evokes feelings of frantic claustrophobia, not helped by the crepuscular light.

Together these two pieces emphasise an important aspect of Gormley’s oeuvre. The body forms that were so strikingly evocative when scattered about London lose much of their vitality in this indoor context. Like kids called in to tea by their mother, they feel somehow tamed. Firmament, on the other hand, designed specifically for this space, would lose the power of its pent-up force if liberated.

Gormley’s figures may feel all too predictable, but his skill is to plant them in places that pioneer fresh responses. He may announce that most public art is “crap” – his own pieces are hardly ground-breaking – but perhaps it’s the places he puts them that give them their power.

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