Claudette Schreuders at Jack Shainman

Greeting visitors to "The Fall," a recent show of polychrome wood sculptures and color lithographs by South African artist Claudette Schreuders, was a female figure that set the serene, symbolically resonant tone of the exhibition. Typically somber and, at 35 inches, average in height for works by this artist, Paradise, as the figure is titled, wears a sleeveless pink shift and tenders a small blue-and-white bird with a red bill, perched on her right hand. Schreuders carves her wood--most often, as here, jacaranda--with great sensitivity. The unpainted areas of light-brown flesh were smoothed to bring out the wood's concentric grain, which encircles the calves and elbows and lends a subtle surface animation to the otherwise still figure, as if welling up from a life force kept cautiously contained.

Of the nine sculptures in the show (all but one dated 2006), five, including Paradise, have related, vaguely Edenic subjects. The Fall is a couple, male and female, standing side by side, with the woman, in shorts and a tee-shirt, cupping a tiny baby in her right palm. The Beginning shows the same Adam-and-Eve surrogates, this time nude, with the woman emerging waist up from the belly of the supine man. Departure is just the nude woman covering her face with her hands as she stumbles blindly along, adopting the pose of Adam in Masaccio's Brancacci Chapel fresco; and Arrival has the woman lying down, with a baby emerging from her stomach. The unlikely looking villain of the group is Trespasser, a standing female figure--a "third person" representing the serpent, as the press release informs us--wearing a red shirt and blue pants, her hands sullenly thrust in her pockets. Only the Masaccio reference makes an iconographic leap into Western art history, so it is the titles and press notes that are left to provide the key to this loose tableau. But piecing together a narrative is unnecessary, as each of the sculptures stands on its own with no greater or lesser mystery than it possesses in the company as a whole.

Based on a type of carving called "colon" (depictions of European settlers by Africans, made throughout the colonial period and adopted in ancestor worship), Schreuders's figures, with their oversized heads and generalized features, have the look of folk art, surreal and chaste. Sometimes, as in lithographs of a woman with sunburnt arms, or of "twins"--seated, cross-legged children, one black and one white--they elliptically address racial identity in South Africa. Dressed in their homely garb, all have the feeling of secularized gods, incorporating as they do elements of religious representations across cultures. One is reminded both of traditional African carving and of the seated, solemn-faced wooden virgins of Romanesque Europe, as well as of sacred effigies in many Catholic societies that are paraded in the streets during festivals.

Schreuders made the fine color lithographs on view here in 2006 at Artists' Press, a rural studio in Mpumalanga, South Africa. Situated against a white background, remote and isolated, are characters based on her sculptures--no less singular and self-contained on paper than they are in three dimensions. This is art that is tacit rather than voluble, respecting the complexities of history and influence and offering no explanations.

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