Original. When an artist makes radical innovations in a familiar medium, or combines several familiar media in a radically original way, it takes a while for the rest of us to catch on. Barbara Goodstein’s relief sculptures, which are done in plaster and modeling paste on rectangular pieces of plywood, may not startle us, but they’re just about the only works to have emerged in this decade that can be said to add something new to sculpture. Since Donatello, all European relief sculpture has been in some respect an extension of painting; Goodstein is the first artist to evolve a relief sculpture style out of an aesthetic derived from painterly painting. Even when her reliefs don’t look like painterly paintings, she’s deriving her rhythms and inflections from them. In her third solo show at the Bowery Gallery in January there were some very high points and some very low points; there wasn’t the across-the-board clarity of thought that the finest pieces in the show might have led you to expect. When an artist begins to raise our expectations, her biggest competition may turn out to be her own work. The Barbara Goodstein who can pull off a work of the caliber of Resurrection (1) can’t yet sustain that level of accomplishment—still, she’s one of the few artists who has a level of accomplishment to fall off from.

There’s no way of knowing for sure if the three faceless white figures in Goodstein’s Resurrection (1)are male or female.