NEW YORK.- Lori Bookstein Fine Art presents a survey of work by Louise Kruger from the nineteen fifties to the present. The exhibition, consisting mostly of carved wood pieces, includes wall reliefs, full-scale figures and portraits, as well as one cast bronze sculpture, on view through June 16th, 2007.

At times humorous and folk-inspired, at others sleek and elegant, Kruger's work is united by a constant exploration of figuration through volume and motion. Occasionally, she uses a specific sitter as a starting point for her sculpture, but intuition always wins over academic rigor. Using a startling economy of means, and with an obvious delight in her medium—the burls, cracks and discolorations in the various woods she uses only enhance her work—Kruger achieves seemingly conflicting ends. The artist's figures are articulations of her relationships to those surrounding her, but they are also incarnations of a common humanity. As deeply personal as they may be, they brim with abstractions and synecdochic shortcuts: faces are often reduced to triangular wedges; a simple upside-down "U" incised on a figure's torso adds to it a whole other dimension of corporeality.

Kruger was born in Los Angeles, California in 1924. She received her formal education at Scripps College, California, and the Art Students League, New York, but it was three unusual apprenticeships which have had the most dramatic implications for her art. During the nineteen fifties, she spent one summer under the wing of Captain Sundquist, a shipbuilder who taught her woodworking and joinery, and another learning metal-working techniques at a foundry in Pistoia, Italy. In the early seventies, Kruger traveled to Kumasi, Ghana, where she studied bronze-making with Chief Opoku Dwumfuor.

Despite attaining international critical attention in the early part of her career, with solo shows at venues including Martha Jackson Gallery, Schoelkopf Gallery and Landmark Gallery, and group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the artist has deliberately withdrawn from the exhibition circuit for various stretches of time during the intervening years. This, taken with the fact that the artist has eschewed any allegiance to a particular movement, has meant that the context of her work has been, first and foremost, her own life. Kruger lives, and continues to work, in New York City.