Natalie Charkow Hollander: Into The Stone

"Sculpture doesn't leave you alone," Natalie Charkow Hollander says. "Painting stays on the wall; it doesn't always demand attention. It doesn't fall on top of you and break, or hurt you." Despite these misgivings, Charkow Hollander has been a passionate, committed sculptor for almost 60 years, one who has transformed our very conceptions of what a sculpture can be for more than 40. In 1974, after almost two decades of making abstract reliefs in metal, she abandoned abstraction and welding for figuration and carving. At a time when much serious vanguard sculpture was being defined in terms of random assemblies of soft or ephemeral materials, she chose to work in that most recalcitrant, labor intensive, brutally present, and traditional of materials, carved stone, exploring the possibilities of using recognizable imagery and narrative, based on works by old and modern masters, from Piero della Francesca to Henri Matisse, including Titian and Nicolas Poussin. But Charkow Hollander doesn't simply translate her two-dimensional sources into three dimensions. Instead she distills them into new kinds of ambiguous objects, drawing us close because of their intimate scale, which belies their actual weight and bulk. (Some are single blocks about 18 inches across, while others are less than half that size; the single blocks are sometimes further subdivided, while occasionally multiple blocks are stacked to make larger works.) We recognize the allusions, usually aided by her titles, but our perceptions of space are tested as much as our knowledge of the history of art. We are aware that we are confronting works made of impenetrable stone, but instead of considering what is before us as a space-displacing mass, we mentally enter an illusionistic space, the way we do a Renaissance painting where the literal surface of the canvas is dissembled, treated as a window into a vision of a three-dimensional world.

Essentially, Charkow Hollander reinvented the relief, reversing our spatial expectations. Instead of building up masses from a background plane to suggest forms in space, as in traditional relief, she treats the surface of her stone block as if it were a transparent boundary between the world around us and the interior world of her sculptures, like the surface of a Renaissance painting. Charkow Hollander's images retreat from that plane and from us, moving further and further into the deeply undercut space of the stone. We feel as if we were allowed to penetrate secret zones, as if we were able to see into depths that seem to exceed the limits of the block. (Despite their potent evocation of measured distance, the sculptures average about three inches deep, with a few of the largest works measuring about five inches.) The blunt, economically rendered figures that inhabit these spaces retain the memory of the stone's density, yet perhaps because of their origins in drawings or paintings, they also suggest lightness and transparency in ways completely at odds with the material's association with mass and bulk. It's as if Charkow Hollander were striving to overcome the irreducible physicality of her medium, to claim for sculpture some of the qualities of the paintings she admires most.

Traditional reliefs project toward the viewer, with foreground elements presented most saliently and distant elements suggested as shallow, incised drawing. Forms deep within Charkow Hollander's carvings can be as sturdy as those closest to us, while in some works, both near and far forms can be aggressively flattened on their front surfaces, as if they had been compressed in an attempt to break through the surface of the block. The acknowledgement of that constraining barrier can even overwhelm the image that is the nominal subject of the sculpture. We feel that we are not looking at the scene, but that we have entered into it. The flattened passages suggest that we are inside Charkow Hollander's fictive spaces, magically projected into the block, so that the surface of the stone is now behind us. Yet we cannot move freely in that interior. It exists in discrete layers, like the progressions of a pop-up book.

Charkow...