Petah Coyne: Galerie Lelong/Julie Saul Gallery. (New York).

There is something exquisitely tacky about Petah Coyne's latest work. Made with beads, ribbons and bows, flowers, diminutive yard-trash statuettes, and fake and stuffed birds, all covered with gallons of melted wax, her sculpture runs distinctly counter to the sensibilities of viewers who may have grown accustomed to the slickness of Miesian modernism, post-Minimalism, and photoconceptualism.

Coyne's frame of reference is decidedly Victorian: decorative, excessive, and funereal. Her last major body of sculpture employed miles of hair, both human and animal, twisting up and down the ...

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