British sculptor Antony Gormley’s summer exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery attracted more than 200,000 visitors, breaking all attendance records for that institution. Besides filling the Hayward with works from different stages of his career, the artist installed his trademark lead casts of his own body on top of buildings surrounding the gallery, causing consternation from passersby caught unawares by their literal presence.

The Sean Kelly Gallery now has an exhibition of three of the artist’s loosely figure-based sculptures, along with “Blind Light” (2007), the installation that gave its name to the Hayward show, and was its principal talking point. A radically simple yet disconcertingly effective work, “Blind Light” is a 28-foot-square glass cube filled with billowing clouds of mist.

The intrepid viewer who enters the space soon loses his or her bearings, unable to see much beyond an extended arm, obliged to look down to walk ahead. Fellow occupants are rendered disembodied voices. Walking along the edge of the room, one might encounter a hand pressed against the glass by a perambulator from outside. The mist feels heavy to the lungs (there is a warning for asthmatics and others posted at the entrance to the installation) and is prone to stinging the eyes and dampening the hair.

This work is a fulsome realization of a central ambition of minimal art — a tradition to which Mr. Gormley hardly belongs — namely that a work is only completed in the act of being experienced. Conceptually — and, from a distance, visually — “Blind Light” is a cool, all-too-familiar art object: a white cube. But experientially it is something very different: a dramatic, forceful way of making the visitor aware of his or her own body in space, all the while disembodying or abstracting the surrounding space that gives a body its context, its parameters, and its social definition.

Perhaps the feeling of being lost in space, of becoming more somatically self-conscious in your isolation, is akin to what the artist himself feels when inside the bandages and plaster as his assistants create the mold for his lead casts. If so, there is a bridge between his more familiar, figural works and this one, which, in other respects, is far removed from those. In his ubiquitous, crudely put together, rough-at-the edges lead casts, a sense of the tension between an absent and present body is achieved through empathy and alienation, whereas in “Blind Light” it is directly experienced.

In the three figural works at Sean Kelly, Mr. Gormley explores ways to represent encasement that are alternative to his ubiquitous, leaden homunculus. In “Freefall II” (2007), for instance, a tight matrix of stainless steel needles is used to denote, at its core, an upside-down free-falling figure, cocooned within a web of looser lines. In “Bodies in Space II” (2007), what looks like a DNA model consists of forged ball bearings arranged in the general shape of a figure.

In contrast to the cohesive rigor of “Blind Light,” these figure works are rather tricky in their decoratively cute and conceptually overdetermined ways to represent the body. They are in danger of becoming academic in their very determination to avoid being so. Even with these limitations, though, these pieces indicate one of the liveliest minds in figurative sculpture.

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Like Mr. Gormley, Joel Shapiro searches for a new dynamic for figuration within sculpture, but he arrived at his task via a different route. Mr. Gormley emerged in the late 1970s heavily influenced by conceptual art and performance, and by ideas of the found object derived from Duchamp, in which process always trumps object. Mr. Gormley has gone so far as to say that works are mere “fall out from a process of investigating the human condition.” The objects or experiences he generates are props in a philosophical investigation.

In contrast, Mr. Shapiro, whose career began earlier and grew directly from minimal art, is fully and formally engaged with the surfaces and structures he generates, and with purely visual thinking. Compared to a romantic such as Mr. Gormley, Mr. Shapiro is a consummate classicist: Essentially a stylist, he works through variations on a given form. He was among those labeled “postminimal” because, while dealing with highly reduced forms — in the case of this show, wooden beams, or bronze demonstrably cast from wood — he allows his work to incorporate recognizable basic things like houses or bodies, albeit in highly pared down, schematic form.

In this exhibition, Mr. Shapiro’s sculpture plays a kind of flirtatious dance with figuration, intimating it in one place, evading it in another. “Untitled” (2002–07), the largest work on view, is a case in point. A sprawling bronze at around 13 by 27 by 12 feet, it is an assemblage of irregular beams and planks (their grain still visible in the bronze casting). Shapes tumble and cascade to denote movement, a moment frozen in time. As in music, you discern a dominant line within a mass of incident, even though there is also a strong sense of economy. The piece belongs to the sculptural convention of a drawing in space, but the blocks have equal weight and substance. A strong vertical intimates a torso, and various extensions could be limbs, but the sculpture still works abstractly, divorced from such a reading.

“Untitled” (2006–07), in wood and casein, an assemblage of eight wooden elements severally painted red or blue, or left in its natural state, can read as a quadruped — an animal or a crawling baby. The straight lines suggest an arching of back and a bowing of limbs. The primary colors and simple shapes elicit a warm sense of the nursery but, formally speaking, the piece plays a very grown-up game.

Gormley until December 1 (528 W. 29th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-239-1181). Shapiro until January 19 (545 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-989-4258).