Danielle Orchard and Aristide Maillol
Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York
March 14 – April 26, 2025
Moon Garden, 2025
Oil on canvas, 80¼ × 68½ inches (203.8 × 174 cm)
Photo Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan
La Nuit, conceived 1908 / cast during the artist’s lifetime
Patinated bronze, 6¹⁵⁄₁₆ × 4¹³⁄₁₆ × 4½ inches (17.6 × 12.2 × 11.5 cm).
Edition 3 of 4
Photo Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan
Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents 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.
Central to the practices of both artists is the woman as muse. Here, in scenes domestic and natural, Danielle Orchard depicts physical and psychological insights gained in her experiences as a new mother—an infant shares each composition with her female protagonists. Aristide Maillol often said, “I invent nothing, no more than the apple tree can pretend to have invented its apples.” His works and those of Danielle 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 Aristide Maillol, the pursuit of the female figure became the artist’s sole occupation upon his turn to sculpture in1898, 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. Danielle 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), Danielle Orchard portrays the silhouettes of three La Nuit (Night) casts by Aristide 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, Aristide Maillol was a committed draftsman, who insisted, according to John 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.” Danielle 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.”
LÉVY GORVY DAYAN, NEW YORK
19 East 64th Street, New York City
