Portfolio > Press & Brochures

Text of the review:

As far as I know, Holland Tunnel is the city's smallest gallery open to the public: it's housed in a gardening shed in a Brooklyn backyard. At the moment, though, it holds something unusually large, a single sculpture of a human body that fills the gallery itself and sits on its roof.
The outdoor section shows the head and torso of a figure dressed in a black leather jacket and a baseball cap, arms folded as if in hunkered-down defiance or for protection against the cold. The figure is revealed to be female by the super-realist rendering of the lower body standing nude inside the shed.
The female colossus has contemporary precedents, among them Charles Ray's towering fashion mannequins, which add up to a joke about the intimidating nature of a certain kind of female glamour. But Ms. Levy, like Lewis Carroll's Alice, makes the idea of a giant growth spurt entirely her own. Her sculpture is a head-to-toe self-portrait, clothed and in control above, exposed and vulnerable below. Whether the piece is about extreme self-confidence or profound self-consciousness is hard to say. It is certainly some kind of sculptural tour de force.

COPYRIGHT 2002 The New York Times Company