WEST NEW YORK, N.J. — Two shrouded female figures rise from a sumptuous landscape of dark velvet and wax-dipped silk flowers. One is imperious in posture, the other turns away in stubborn resistance. Their tense standoff seems to charge the roiling swells and eddies of material between them.



This just-completed piece by Petah Coyne stretched across the artist’s expansive studio here during a late-summer visit — one of her many extravagant and psychologically complex sculptures. Several Neo-Baroque chandeliers dangled from the ceiling, laden with wax flowers, taxidermy birds, religious statuary, tassels, bows and thickets of chicken wire coated with black sand. Silver peacocks, like ladies in waiting, were poised to be pressed into service on future works.

The new velvet work, “Untitled #1379 (The Doctor’s Wife),” has become the centerpiece of Ms. Coyne’s exhibition, “Having Gone I Will Return,” through Oct. 27 at Galerie Lelong & Co. It’s her first solo show in New York in a decade.