Sometimes a single exhibition can inspire an entire enterprise. Such is the case with Natalie Charkow Hollander’s memorable installation of relief sculptures at Lohin Geduld Gallery in 2004. These sculptures, which transposed scenes from master paintings into carved stone, moved Cynthia Harmon, Jock Ireland and Jolie Stahl to try their own hands in more pliant materials. Seven years later, the two dozen small reliefs by these three artists and Hollander create a feast of intrepidly worked stone, terra cotta, plaster and stoneware in the gallery of the Hudson Guild, Chelsea’s venerable community center.
Making a painting three-dimensional is a quirky venture. Painting and sculpting, after all, are entirely different processes. The first simulates volumes with a generated inner light; the second manipulates actual volumes under ambient light. But the peculiarities of relief sculpture—which can range from an almost drawing-like flatness to deep, in-the-round modeling—give the four artists wide latitude. Transcending dutiful copies, the strongest works here become individual expressions in their own right.
Paintings by Titian, Masaccio, El Greco and Matisse, among others, reappear in new guises. Ireland’s pieces, which resemble bronzes but in reality are painted plaster, are modeled in deep, muscular relief. His make-over of Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon” captures a good deal of the original’s grandness of gesture; Actaeon’s arm, raised in surprise, seems to arrest the twisting movements of the half-dozen other figures. Nearby, another sculpture transcribes Masaccio’s “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” with simple earthiness.
Working in shallower relief in terra cotta, Harmon re-creates the compositions of Titian, Poussin and other masters in a lively but more studied fashion. Her “Descent from the Cross (after Rubens)” vividly summarizes the drama of bodies slumping, stretching and lifting. With their intense green-blues and pinks, Stahl’s painted and glazed stoneware reliefs of paintings by Chardin, Max Beckmann and others are the most flamboyant works here. But I found equally poignant the unpainted surfaces of her terra cotta interpretation of a Piero della Francesca, in which two figures momentously draw back the curtains before a sleeping king.
Particularly touching are Hollander’s sculptures, whose featureless figures—populating the deeply carved recesses of blocks of stone—radiate a delicate resolve. Updating Titian’s “Bacchanal of the Andrians,” tiny, chunky figures teem and swirl in a dark stone called pyrophyllite. Hollander clearly realizes that realistic volumes, in both painting and sculpture, aren’t very interesting in themselves; as countless academic artworks remind us, a master’s characterization of a subject depends less on shaping exact volumes than in giving them rhythmic import. Even while absorbing the masters, she follows her own star; in her double remake in limestone of Matisse’s “Carmelina”—the composition appears twice, once in deep relief and then again as a series of flattened planes—the artist has added her own interpretation of a painting’s light. She has polished the surfaces receiving reflected light in Matisse’s original—a final, curious embellishment of her singular task.
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Through April 18, Hudson Guild Gallery, 441 W. 26th St., 212-760-9837.
