Lévy Gorvy Dayan is thrilled to announce an exhibition of recent work by Danielle Orchard in dialog with sculptures by Aristide Maillol (1861–1944), on the Fifth Ground of 19 East sixty fourth Avenue in New York. Staging a dialogue between portray and sculpture that’s past time, the exhibition will characterize visions of type, quantity, and line explored by the feminine determine.
Central to the practices of each artists is the lady as muse. Right here, in scenes home and pure, Orchard depicts bodily and psychological insights gained in her experiences as a brand new mom—an toddler shares every composition together with her feminine protagonists. Maillol usually stated, “I invent nothing, not more than the apple tree can fake to have invented its apples.” His works and people of Orchard are each marked by the impulse in the direction of, within the phrases of artwork historian John Rewald, “the expression of reality and the stability of varieties.”
For Maillol, the pursuit of the feminine determine grew to become the artist’s sole occupation upon his flip to sculpture in 1898, after his work in tapestry threatened him with blindness. Embracing this alteration with pleasure and vigor, Maillol developed a harmonious oeuvre that married experimentation, classical Greek influences, and the pastoral. Orchard notes, “I’m how [Maillol] is pulling from antiquity, with a deference for abstraction in ways in which I’ve considered in portray—and inhabiting these varieties as a feminine physique.”
Navigating solidity and delicacy, Maillol and Orchard’s compositions characterize densely sculptural beings, rendered by hand in clay or by brush in oil. But, by symbolism, rounded curves, diffuse mild, softened shadows, or washes of colour, their works possess an intimacy, quietude, and stillness. In Moon Backyard (2025), Orchard portrays the silhouettes of three La Nuit (Night time) casts by Maillol within the background. Two dandelions seem undisturbed within the grass close to a totemic mom and youngster, whereas a girl reposes within the foreground with an owl on her head, an emblem of the barred owl that resides in Orchard’s yard in Pelham, Massachusetts.
Amongst Maillol’s most vital works, La Nuit depicts a seated feminine determine whose legs and arms are drawn inwards in a self-contained pose that conveys thriller, serenity, and universality. Upon viewing La Nuit in Paris on the 1909 Salon d’Automne, Auguste Rodin declared, “One forgets too usually that the human physique is an structure—a residing structure.”
Bridging two and three dimensions, Maillol was a dedicated draftsman, who insisted, in keeping with Rewald, “that it was potential to make a statuette from an excellent drawing.” He continues, “[Maillol’s] drawings practically at all times reveal the preoccupations of a modeler: their curves are projected into house, their static poses being akin to sculptured varieties.” Orchard relatedly harnesses the sculptural qualities of her medium, constructing skinny layered functions of oil paint, whereas negotiating colour and type. Representing a timeless alternate throughout disciplines, the exhibited works seize, within the elder sculptor’s phrases, “poems of life.”
