Their provisional qualities (lightness, thinness, crispness, tautness) are emblematic of the transitory existence of everything we know. Their unobtrusive hues are often raw naturals, but even when coloring agents are added, they do not declaim but murmur in the reserved tones of a northern landscape: they are lichen greens, birch and cottonwood whites, mushroom browns and grays. The objects are sometimes opaque but more often translucent, as if they were in the process of thinning to gossamer. Lutz favors nature’s female forms: interior folds, concavities for internal treasures and pleasures, passages for privacy. She tends to make vessels, which are open and receptive in some cases, closed and secretive in others. Consider a large piece, three feet long, that hangs from three cords. It is a rounded container whose shape brings to mind the inverted shell of some hump-backed tortoise. The drum-like top is pale blue, the curving wall various tones of brown with a sprinkling of black. In the firm wall is a group of tiny holes; peer through them and the inside seems incandescent (Lutz has hidden reflective copper inside). Or consider a tiny work, a leaflike umbrella/dome measuring just 2.5 by 1.5 inches, which is unevenly bisected by a brown “stem” that pokes directly into the gallery wall. This little shelter is held weightlessly aloft. Lutz also sets female forms at opposition to geometrical elements, most often a flat, rectangular sheet of paper that frames the object and focuses our attention on it while concealing it from direct view. For example, a piece of paper 13.5 inches tall is held an inch or two from the wall by a long pin in each corner. This sheet is a veil, occluding whatever is behind it. You squint at the front, peer at the sides, and then guess at the character of ghostly presences. You make out a dark green vertical rectangle and a pale green tilted oval with something more shadowy behind it, plus a bit of wiry outline. Cupping, slitting, wrapping, folding, stretching, smoothing out and joining are actions embedded in the known and unknowable parts of Lutz’s sculptures. The works are physicalized nature poems, closer to the hermetic mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins than to Wordsworth’s romantic sumblimities. Despite a consistent delicacy of form and color, these objects decline to be sentimental. Lutz does not elevate or embellish nature. She does not embrace the celebratory birth of springtime flowering or the lushness of rampant tropical growth. She appreciates details, and her works evoke austere or gentle states: you might think of bleached grasses in the cool sun of autumn, or the dry darkness of rock outcroppings, or the palest green of life resuming under the cold spring ground. At the same time, you can envision Lutz turning away from neon lights, car alarms and pavement, giving up sound systems, plastic bags and fast food, shrugging off lawn chairs, chemical cleansers and high heels. Her works deflect all the visual and aural jangle of modern living. What’s left after removing the obvious is a distillation, not a dream. Stripping away one option after another, she discovers all she needs in the mundane facts of organic growth and decay and the diurnal movement of light—the reductive essence, the come and go, of life. Only one work is titled. Although Lutz has in the past used titles of evocative ambiguity, she has now largely given that up, as well. The works seem quite comfortable with anonymity because they are so like natural objects; you might think she has found or grown them rather than made them. But not quite. The notion fails. While the range of objects could be compared with a collection of shells, wasps’ nests or cocoons, it would take more than a lifetime in the woods to amass such extraordinary examples. One object is indeed found: a bag of ready-mix concrete, hardened through the collaboration of a forgetful person and the natural water cycle. But this exception proves the rule. The objects are pervaded by a sense of deliberateness and a feeling of underlying toughness. These qualities separate Lutz’s work from the random accidents of nature as well as from more typical natural-materials-based artworks, which usually praise nature’s beauty and forget its cruelty. An impression of preciousness and fragility arises in these works out of the process of their making. You sense the acute focus and manual deftness of an artist who both cooperates with and challenges her materials. Why does Lutz make such things? She is not a botanist, an entomologist or a physiologist; there is no scientific rationale for these forms. But maybe the question is as absurd as asking why nature keeps on making trees when there are already so many fine examples. There is never a perfect version of anything. Whatever grows is already dying. The nature of nature is variation and change. To live is to accept risk and enter the fray. So Lutz does what she must. The paper objects offer seemingly contradictory combinations of virtuosity and impersonality, of control and abandoned ego. You will not find any kind of personal mark in this exhibition. Lutz’s attitude recalls that of the late 60s’/early 70’s Japanese art movement known as Mono-ha, or the school of things. The Mono-ha artists worked in a variety of substances from steel to stone and wax to raw cotton; always they considered the material to be making as great a contribution to the artwork as the artist—in fact, maybe greater, because the artist can be discredited, lost or forgotten, but the material plays its role as long as the artwork continues to exist. Lutz must see her task of creation as choosing the material, arranging It, and specifying it limits. Nothing of her physical character is stamped on the work, yet her sensibility is written in her choices of exacting labor, directed vision and form stripped down to its sinews. What does it mean to do this kind of work now, at the end of the 20th century, in the age of synthetics, cheap and fast reproductions, electronics and the Internet? What does it mean to speak in materials and simple forms when art’s currently fashionable languages seem to be words and moving images? Undoubtedly Lutz’s motivations are personal rather than cultural or temporal. Certainly the sculptures have a base in reality that is not particular to one place, and so they can be shared across cultures, without the impediment of spoken language. In part, they are probably responses to twentieth century ecological concerns such as damage to the environment and the urban and even suburban estrangement from the natural world. To slow down, look, touch, think and then to act very deliberately, as Lutz does, is to establish a perceptual and physical relationship with that estranged and damaged yet utterly essential natural world. Lutz has devoted herself to this course during eras of artistic engagement with artifice—Pop, Minimal and Appropriation art and the sort of Earthworks that involve impositions on the landscape. But is has been a time of ecological activism as well, and other artists have also responded to this situation. Lutz’s larger projects, indoor and outdoor installations not included in this exhibition, use trees, rocks, metal or metallic leaf, glass, mirrors, light, various meshes both hard and soft, fabric and paper in any number of forms. These works place her in a context of site-specific, land-centered or process-oriented art. You might think of Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral arrangements of leaves or snow or flowers; Mary Miss’s structures from which to regard landscape; James Turrell’s light manipulations; David Nash’s ideal and whimsical forms and “living sculptures” derived from the given characteristics of trees. Although there is unquestionably a continuity between Lutz’s large and small works, the smaller pieces, including the ones in this exhibition, have a condensed immediacy and delicacy that may recall the materials hunger of Eva Hesse or Donald Lipsky and at the same time the near-invisible touch of Agnes Martin or Richard Tuttle. Martin Puryear’s intermediate-scale sculptures (neither as large as Lutz’s environments nor as small as the objects in this show) share with hers their gentle abstraction and fine workmanship. Paper, for Lutz, may be both a medium and a metaphor: bits of natural stuff brought together to make something useful, beautiful and vulnerable. This material is not anonymous but has several distinct identities in her work. The exhibition checklist offers an incantatory list of ingredients: mulberry root, rotted flax, abaca (banana fiber), kozo (mulberry), avocado peel and more. Lutz uses paper for its information-carrying potential, although she is not concerned with words. The paper conveys a nonverbal message about a way of being. Lutz seems to be showing us that one can still find a place of quiet; one can still make an intimate relationship with a natural substance, one can still devise a form that is reminiscent of flora and fauna yet reflects an artist’s nuances as sensitively as anything imaginable. In this manner, both the exhibition title, “(stillness),” and the work itself assure us that our time is not just electronics and plastics. We are still creatures of the natural world. We still move in an envelope of air, responsive to hot and cold, wet and dry, light and darkness, harshness and softness, rigor and giving. Our hands are for making, and our minds are for both reasoning and imagining, as much now as ever. The tender intensity of Lutz’s working, so evident in these objects, illuminates our options.