There’s no divorcing the figure from the base in Stephan Balkenhol’s sculptures. If these ordinary guys, his most frequent subjects, were plunked directly on the floor, they would disappear in the crowd. As it is, they acquire a quirky prestige by virtue of their elevation, hefted up on stacks of thick spools or sidled onto flatbeds perched on wooden sawhorses, slouched in single file as if walk the plank.

Balkenhol is entangling us in the skeins of sculpture’s history, and maybe in politics as well. As Brancusi moved from Romania to France, he refined and reduced his portraits of birds and humans