Van der Weyden often depicted lifelike and voluminous figures set in shallow sculptural spaces, in which they seemed cramped and larger than scale.

The sculptural space also brings life to the center of the building.

He also embraced horizontal, ground-hugging compositions as the more exciting way to explore sculptural space.

Instead of just cooking up three dimensions with all of the responsibility that modelling and casting can involve, she 'plunders' the freshness of a medium she doesn't fully understand to bring spatial illusion into her own sculptural space.

Mr. Arnoldi has treated the restaurant interior as a series of sculptural spaces.

"We were going for a powerful, sculptural dramatic space," he said, to fulfill the owner's modernist fantasy through color and shape rather than furniture.

Many of those done a bit later in oils have three-dimensional objects attached to their surfaces so that, like furniture, they carve out sculptural space.

"But for me it's a medium of expression in its own right that, at best, is made up of other art forms, and of basic elements such as color, light, design and sculptural space."

Although Mr. Serra is not an artist whose work is easily subordinated or made to seem decorous, here his sculpture does seem ornamental in the midst of Mr. Freed's profoundly sculptural spaces.

These works not only pun on the much-rumored death of painting (the painting as fly-ridden corpse), but they also leap back and forth between inner, pictorial space and outer, sculptural space.