NEW YORK, NY.- Lévy Gorvy Dayan opened an exhibition of sculptures by Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) in conversation with new paintings by Danielle Orchard (b. 1985), created on the occasion of the exhibition. Staging a dialogue between painting and sculpture that is beyond time, the exhibition represents visions of form, volume, and line, explored through the female figure.
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Central to the practices of both artists is the woman as muse. Here, in scenes domestic and natural, Orchard depicts physical and psychological insights gained in her experiences as a new mother—an infant shares each composition with her female protagonists. Maillol often said, “I invent nothing, no more than the apple tree can pretend to have invented its apples.” His works and those of Orchard are both marked by the impulse towards, in the words of art historian John Rewald, “the expression of truth and the balance of forms.”
For Maillol, the pursuit of the female figure became the artist’s sole occupation upon his turn to sculpture in 1898, after his work in tapestry threatened him with blindness. Embracing this change with joy and vigor, Maillol developed a harmonious oeuvre that married experimentation, classical Greek influences, and the pastoral. Orchard notes, “I am looking at how [Maillol] is pulling from antiquity, with a deference for abstraction in ways that I have thought about in painting—and inhabiting these forms as a female body.”
Navigating solidity and delicacy, Maillol and Orchard’s compositions represent densely sculptural beings, rendered by hand in clay or by brush in oil. Yet, through symbolism, rounded curves, diffuse light, softened shadows, or washes of color, their works possess an intimacy, quietude, and stillness. In Moon Garden (2025), Orchard portrays the silhouettes of three La Nuit (Night) casts by Maillol in the background. Two dandelions appear undisturbed in the grass near a totemic mother and child, while a woman reposes in the foreground with an owl on her head, an emblem of the barred owl that resides in Orchard’s backyard in Pelham, Massachusetts.
Among Maillol’s most significant works, La Nuit depicts a seated female figure whose arms and legs are drawn inwards in a self-contained pose that conveys mystery, serenity, and universality. Upon viewing La Nuit in Paris at the 1909 Salon d’Automne, Auguste Rodin declared, “One forgets too often that the human body is an architecture—a living architecture.”
Bridging two and three dimensions, Maillol was a committed draftsman, who insisted, according to Rewald, “that it was possible to make a statuette from a good drawing.” He continues, “[Maillol’s] drawings nearly always reveal the preoccupations of a modeler: their curves are projected into space, their static poses being akin to sculptured forms.” Orchard relatedly harnesses the sculptural qualities of her medium, building thin layered applications of oil paint, while negotiating color and form. Representing a timeless exchange across disciplines, the exhibited works capture, in the elder sculptor’s words, “poems of life.”
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