New York
“In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” This refrain from T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock comes to mind when walking among the 10 bronze female nudes in “Metropolis,” Rebecca Warren’s mesmerizing current exhibition (on view through June 28, 2025). Partition walls painted a soft pink subdivide the gallery into discrete spaces that encourage engaging, often intimate encounters with these figures, which explore, along with several assemblages, the many expressive and conceptual possibilities of sculptural form.
Installed on tilted plinths and dollies, each of Warren’s figures seems poised as if in mid-movement. Heavily worked surfaces trace the energy and marks of the artist’s hand while also capturing light and sustaining the sensation of fluid, mutable form. Exaggeration and distortion abound—limbs multiply, misshaped arms and hands turn into cartoonish appendages, legs transition into support elements. Hand-painted traces of blue, pink, and gold add an additional layer to a sensuous materiality that begs to be touched.
Like Eliot’s poem, Warren’s sculptures invite reflection on art and life, time and memory, tradition and dissent. Bonne Robin (Voyager K), her body covered with gold paint and a real ribbon tied around her cast bronze braids, stands with arms pulled back in a pose reminiscent of Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. This remembrance of things past is fleeting, however, as a length of cast wood held by a distorted and exaggerated arm counteracts the sculpture’s curvilinear shapes with the bracing balance of a diagonal beam.
Warren’s contrary, probing, and playful reimaging of tradition continues throughout the show. Felicity, CluTe, Voyager D, and Felicité describe the tentative and changeful poses of models in the studio, recalling Rodin’s studies and impressionist technique while also exploring underlying formal elements such as balance and composition. Embedded or attached casts of wood and rebar combine with real materials such as a ribbon or a twig to unsettle the illusion of bodies standing on boxes or lying about. Rudely inserted into each model’s relaxed contrapposto pose, these added elements call to mind the intensely realistic and at times gruesome depictions of martyrs in Medieval and Renaissance statuary.
The Models (b.) and (a.), with their sinuously curving bodies and contrapposto poses, might appear identical, but they are painted with different patinas. The same figure, now alone and covered in gold paint, reappears in The Models (c.). These near-duplicates engage us through placement and treatment in careful comparative looking, raising questions about original and copy.
In Metropolis, two figures join together in a sort of wrestling match or dance performance, their upside-down, intertwined bodies offering a modern take on the complex arrangements and multiple perspectives of Baroque sculpture. At the same time, details such as an oversize Philip Guston-like shoe add a humorous, absurdist note that subverts tradition.
Other, non-figurative works reduce sculptural form to a linear essence. Part resembles an overlooked yardstick or board leaning against the wall as if to measure space. Sculpture O consists of an assembly of two-by-fours, cast in bronze, set on a diagonal and subdivided into triangles that conceptually explore line and movement in space even as the overall arrangement also suggests a dancer poised on one leg. Materiel adds yet another reflection on process. Placed on a plinth covered with brushstrokes in the same colors as the figures, this replica might be a still-life of a banana and glass jar covered in paint or just as likely an informal, close-up look at how cast bronze can simultaneously imitate and transform.
