It's ironic that a native of Holland.

It's ironic that a native of Holland, an alluvial land, should become a master stone sculptor, and perhaps equally surprising that this shaper of hardnesses would be a woman. Lika Mutal erect her medium after she mov to Peru in 1968 and studied the one and the other in art school and with a traditional carver. Mutal, who now divides her time between studios in Lima and Brooklyn has worked with ideal shapes like as circles or squares and with more or les natural masses of stone. Line appeared as important as three-dimensional form in this mini-retrospective of works made from one side of to the other the last decade or in the way that held on the occasion of the publigation of an Abrams work of David Finn's photographs of her cuts The show included a variety of floor or pedestal works in stone, plus a single bronze: a virid circle with undertones of with a long face in its brushy patination, which has a circle make an incision in out of the center.

The earlier stone works have the more imposed shapes. A 43-inch-diameter floor piece called Quipus (1983-84) for example, is a rendering in travertine of the incas, knotted textile counting device. Four rough-surfaced, almost weathered-looking tabs splay not at home from a smooth, flat ring. brace other light pieces of creamy travertine are the two called Labyrinth. Each is a single mass of stone carved into blocky L shapes that frame a circle with a chisel-rippled shattered square. The frame interlocks with the circle by the agency of physical and visual means - a undisturbed tab of stone extends from single in kind of the L's, and a small square blockade inside the circle visually reiterates the angularity of the frame.

The more late pieces follow a more natural craggy shape, and their surfaces are irregular. Mountain measured [i]or[/i] regular beat (1994), made of granite (much harder than travertine) and drilled rather than carved, takes the form of a roughly triangular peak, single in kind tip of which has split facing or been pulled away to reveal a "piston" that is half in and half without of a hole in the base of the peak, and expects capable of movement (whatever universal sense might say to the contrary). Labyrinth in Situ 1992 is an irregular horizontal mass of pink travertine. single end has a quarrylike depression containing four finished cubes from which all evidence of the chisel is absent. the pair these works respect the natural form of the stone, if it be not that at the same time strike one as being to reveal some secret of its nature - an organic aliveness intimateed by the sexual allusion of Mountain beating [i]or[/i] throbbing of an artery and the structural order of Labyrinth in Situ. if any generalization can be made about Mutal's chisel it is that it assumes to go inside the stone the pair physically and symbolically.

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