On the heels of Thomas Schutte’s career survey show at the Museum of Modern Art, the German artist’s provocative ‘Women’ sculpture series from the late ‘90s to 2006 at Gagosian Gallery invites viewers to take a closer look at one of Schutte’s most engaging and uncomfortable bodies of work. Arranged on cold, steel tables in reclining poses like odaliques, familiar from countless paintings and sculptures throughout European art history, the figures signal failure (one figure is pressed flat as if by a giant hand) and trauma (a rigidly tense gingerbread man-like cutout flings an arm into the air). A deflated sculpture with mask-like face and melting limbs recalls the distortions of Picasso’s nudes while others recall Henri Matisse’s or Aristide Maillol’s posed women. Reacting in the past to the constraints inherited by a post-war German artist, Schutte has presented models or proposals as artwork. Similarly, the Frauen exist on uncertain ground, both challenging and reinforcing objectification of the female form at a scale and a degree of polish that defies audiences not to engage. (On view through Feb 22nd).