John Anderson began as a logger in Seattle. When heavy snow halted logging in winter, he went to art school during the hiatus. Discharged from the army after the Korean War, he studied full time on the GI Bill. Even then, he went back to logging in the summer.

His recent sculpture has the spirit of a lumberjack’s tall tale: monumental, heroic, yet with mythic whimsy at its heart. If Paul Bunyan took to the woods with a buzz saw and carpenter’s tools, he would come up with something similar: not as sophisticated, but just as vigorous, sui generis, and larger than life.

Mr. Anderson’s achievement outweighs his name recognition among audiences reliant on the assurance of brands. He was one of the first artists exhibited by Allan Stone. With his eye for the fey and uncommon, Stone took the sculptor on board in 1962 and continued to exhibit him over the decades. This is Mr. Anderson’s 13th solo exhibition at the gallery. The work on view has a muscular beauty that is singularly its own, and stands askance of a fashion. Earlier sculptures were carved objects reminiscent of tools; some were painted. Recent pieces are massive accumulations of sectioned tree limbs, stripped of bark and carved into varied cylinders and spools. Raw surfaces and suggestive shapes carry the frisson of bleached skeletal remains.

Some sections retain the anatomy of a branch and resemble the articulations of vertebrae; others are planed in ways that recall intricate hand and foot bones. Segment contours vary as finger bones do; one plane might be convex, another concave or straight. Distal ends tend to be smaller than the proximal, increasing the viewer’s association of them with tapering phalanges.

The overall effect is at once archaic and thoroughly contemporary. Each untitled assemblage is as much an installation as a work of sculpture. It sheds immobility — a classic characteristic of sculpture — for potential movement. There is a provisional quality to each arrangement, a sense that all would drape differently if Babe the Blue Ox gave it a shove.

Individual wooden forms are strung together on a metal cable. The cables are grouped and suspended from a central steel plate or bar attached to the ceiling. One sculpture hangs from two supports, like a sling or hammock. Another runs across a parallel bar in the manner of a mammoth beaded curtain. Surprisingly fluid for something so bulky, each cascade of threaded cable provides it own hem. Mr. Anderson’s end run around installation art’s discarded pedestal allows the work to drop as gracefully in descent as traditional sculpture rises.

Until March 29 (113 E. 90th St., between Lexington and Park avenues, 212-987-4997).