What happens in my head is an infernal obsession, and what I do in sculpture is what I salvage from that obsession. It is a nightmare, a natural critical state; I walk down the street and death is everywhere. That is my subject, as much as fullness and emptiness, being and not being, presence and absence. It’s like being a prisoner of contradictions. There’s the need to rescue at least one letter from all that, as I know I won’t be able to rescue the whole text. This kind of conscience comes with age; you abandon arrogance.

He donates Crucifiction (1983) to the Museo de Arte Moderno.

Un pórtico para Marechal (“A Portal for Marechal”) receives the Adquisición Banco Ciudad de Buenos Aires Prize, which pays homage to the writer Leopoldo Marechal, at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. Gómez’s work builds on a relief previously made for the Moscú centre (1988). The new piece, in fact, recycles half of the old one, which remains completely white and changes position: the arch now faces up and a cornice crowned with a frog, a symbolic animal used in previous works, is added on the top of its keystone. A critical appraisal states that “the least debated decision was the first prize in sculpture, awarded to Norberto Gómez (...) The wining work (...) presents the viewer with an idea which is very close to the mechanical universe dreamed up by Marechal in his poem about a robot”.