Seeing through stone: Natalie Charkow Hollander's deeply carved reliefs offer a sophisticated take on, and view into, the conceptual spaces of renowned paintings. A recent gallery survey covered more than 20 years' work

"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." Not that she would rather work in two dimensions. Much as she reveres painting and drawing, Charkow Hollander has been a passionate, committed sculptor for more than 40 years. Yet for decades, she has been striving to overcome the irreducible physicality of her discipline, to claim for sculpture some of the qualities of the paintings she admires most. After concentrating almost exclusively on constructing abstract metal reliefs from the late 1950s until the mid-1970s, in 1974 Charkow Hollander' definitively abandoned abstraction and welding for figuration and carving, in that most recalcitrant, labor-intensive, brutally present and traditional of materials, stone.

Since then, she has explored the possibilities of explicit imagery and implicit narrative while remaining an uncompromising modernist, using paintings and drawings by old and modern masters as the basis for three-dimensional objects that test our perceptions of space. Reconciling these apparently contradictory aims might seem impossible, even foolhardy. But the 25 works in Charkow Hollander's show last season at New York's Lohin-Geduld Gallery, her first in more than two decades--the earliest work in the show was dated 1980-81, the most recent 2002-03--made it plain that she has not only succeeded in rising to her self-imposed challenges, but succeeded brilliantly.

Most of the pieces in Charkow Hollander's show were based on the work of artists ranging from Piero della Francesca to Henri Matisse, with Titian and Nicolas Poussin holding honored places. But Charkow Hollander does not simply transcribe pictorial illusions of mass and space as literally three-dimensional objects. Instead, she uses her chosen images as starting points for near-abstract dramas in which potent narratives are suggested by blunt forms. Essentially, she has reinvented the relief, translating time-honored conceptions of pictorial space into unexpected, wholly modern structures that simultaneously embody a complex dialogue with conventions of representation and defy them. Instead of building up masses from a background plane to suggest three-dimensional forms in space, as in traditional relief, Charkow Hollander treats the surface of her stone block as though it were an implacable plane defining the separation between our external world and the internal world of her sculptures.

Even though she literally penetrates the block with her array of traditional stone carvers' chisels, mallets and files (and the occasional power tool), the resulting reliefs retreat from the viewer, moving farther and farther into the deeply undercut space of the block, as though shrinking from the material reality of the generating stone. We seem to see into, or through, contained spaces that appear to penetrate beyond the clearly defined limits of the blocks. (The sculptures average about 3 inches in depth, with a few of the largest works measuring 5 inches deep.) The economically rendered figures that inhabit these spaces carry with them the memory of stone's density and resistance, yet the whole suggests lightness and transparency in ways completely at odds with the material's usual associations with mass. Charkow Hollander's ideal installation sets her carved blocks flush with the expanse of the supporting wall, further disembodying them. (At Lohin-Geduld, the largest works were inset; most smaller works were pedestal-mounted against the wall, which tended to emphasize their object-like qualities.)

Unlike the shallow, incised drawing that indicates distance in the backgrounds of traditional figurative reliefs, forms deep within Charkow Hollander's carvings can be as spatially articulate as those closest to us. But--especially in her recent work--both near and far forms can be aggressively flattened on their front surfaces, as though they had been compressed by an attempt to project beyond the limiting barrier of the block. The acknowledgement of that barrier can be the starting point of a sculpture, rather than the image that constitutes its nominal subject. The most extreme manifestations of this notion, a group of "cave" sculptures, verge on abstraction. Even when the generating motif remains recognizable--a Matisse nymph and satyr, for example (Homage to Matisse I, 1991), or his studio interior from the Phillips Collection (Homage to Matisse II, 2002-03)--Charkow Hollander suggests that we are not looking at the scene, but have entered into it. The flattened passages imply that we are inside the fictive pictorial arena, as if we had been projected through the surface plane. Yet the interior space does not flow smoothly; instead, it exists in layers, like the measured progressions of a pop-up book.

Charkow Hollander slices through her motifs, taking sequential sections as though performing an esthetic CAT scan. She recombines the slices and sets the results side by side. Each section of the four-part Regarding Piero (1999), for example, begins from a slightly different, imagined viewpoint on The Flagellation's complicated setting--higher, lower, or from deeper within--revealing the richness of Piero's great picture. We begin to consider representation as metaphor and to think about the nature of sculpture itself.