Eva Rothschild Archer, Michael and Shave, Stuart

One of Britain's leading young sculptors, Eva Rothschild reworks the austerities and textures of Minimalism into more fetish-inflected terrain. Sometimes emphatically geometric, sometimes resembling a Surrealist object, her works revolve around a now established repertoire of materials: metal, wood, Perspex, ceramic and leather. This volume, the only monograph in print, surveys her work to date.

The advance notice was striking: The gallery's tabloid-style newsletter featured a set of images in which individuals stand against a gallery wall holding snakes. Sometimes fondling the creatures, sometimes wearing them entwined around their arms or necks like exotic jewelry, the human subjects look entirely comfortable with their seductive, intimate, and potentially murderous companions. "Here," Eva Rothschild seems to be saying with her photographs, "this is what I do." The snakes are like simple, abstract lines, folding and refolding, moving from one to two to three dimensions. In this regard, they echo forms found throughout her work, and evident again here: the plaited leather that often covers metal armatures, as in Higher Love (all works 2007); sinuous shapes, like...