William Tucker at McKee

Five gnarled blobs in dark, glistening bronze were arrayed on a white plinth near the gallery's entrance. Knotted yet sleek, they seemed to flop about like fish. Close perusal of these works revealed them to be hands, life-size (for a grown man), loosely cupped or lightly clenched and bluntly severed above the wrist. Not long ago, William Tucker assiduously confounded the identification of such larval lumps, leaving their billowing, vaguely anatomical amorphousness tantalizingly inchoate. Yet even as his work becomes more conventionally legible, the artist is able to forestall the viewer's recognition of such abundantly familiar contours as the bunching convexities and concavities at the ends of his own arms.

Tactility is both symbolized and embodied in the vigorous surfaces of these hand-modeled hands. The pieces don't defy gravity so much as heighten the viewer's awareness of it, and, as with Brancusi, the relation of sculpture to base or pedestal is paramount. The 4-foot-long Night (2004) eventually registers as a hand resting on its back, generalized fingers firmly curled and forearm canted upward. The gleaming patina emphasizes highlights, and therefore modeling, despite which Night seems scarcely to bear on its pedestal. It is not a fragment but a synecdoche, expressing an entire body's coiled restlessness.

Cave (2003), conceived in plaster for eventual bronze casting, slumps on its pallet like a fallen centurion. It is the largest of the hands at nearly 8 feet long; as the observer circumambulates it, a few degrees' shift changes the view from mysteriously abstract to overtly referential, bringing the viewer into an intimate, kinetic relation to the work. Here the identifying passage is the curve of the thumb to the fleshy bulge at its base to the rippling tendons of the wrist.

With the wrist bent, the tapering contour of forearm to fist resembles the head and neck of a horse, a similarity borne out by Greek Horse (2003), which rears up on its pedestal. The matte, variegated green patina diffuses light and contributes to the sense of weightlessness. The most descriptive work in the show, its source resides in the Elgin Marbles.

Indeed, each of these works has a source in other figurative sculpture. Night, for example, is derived from the unfinished left hand of Michelangelo's eponymous marble in the Medici Chapel. Elsewhere, viewers experience the slightly startling realization that an enormous, stumplike lump of plaster resembling a mutant cauliflower is a torso. The plaster Dancer (2002-04) is the latest of Tucker's monumental, radically truncated torsos in contrapposto, mid-thigh to chest, disguised by size and rough facture. The furrow identifying the spinal column leads to lumbar curve, coccyx and buttocks, disclosing that a jutting protuberance is a lifted right leg, ending at the knee. Developed from a disarmingly naturalistic Degas sculpture, Dancer similarly grapples with gravity, albeit on a vastly different scale than the little ballerina.

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