Orly Genger, in Madison Square Park "If I could put my body into my work," Orly Genger likes to say, "that would be the ultimate." Some might argue that she does that already in her sculptures. Over the last 10 years, Ms. Genger has become known for creating ambitious installations from seemingly endless coils of rope that she crochets and teases into shapes that recall Modern masterworks. In 2007 she filled a Chelsea gallery with 250,000 feet of knotted, paint-saturated rope, creating a black, lava-y environment that suggested Walter de Maria's "Earth Room." The next year, using similar materials, she built an even larger installation for the lobby of the Indianapolis Museum of Art - a sly take on the aggressive metal stacks and cubes of Minimalists like Tony Smith and Donald Judd. In 2010, for a show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass., Ms. Genger used 100 miles of red painted rope to create "Big Boss," an 11.5-foot-high stack that burst through a gallery wall and bubbled over for 28 feet into an adjoining room - a giant Color Field painting run amok. Now Ms. Genger, 34, has delivered her largest and most labor-intensive work yet, a public sculpture in Madison Square Park called "Red, Yellow and Blue." On view through Sept. 8, it's made of 1.4 million feet of hand-crocheted lobster-fishing rope, which she has used to create three towering enclosures, each painted a different primary color. Seen from afar, their undulating walls arch up into the trees, suggesting a mash-up of a Richard Serra's "Torqued Ellipse," a psychedelic cityscape by Peter Max and a Claes Oldenburg-esque layer cake. Covering three separate lawns in the park - some 4,500 square feet - the project is the Madison Square Park Conservancy's largest to date. More remarkable, Ms. Genger has handled practically every inch of its materials herself. For the last two years, she and a team of assistants, most of them young women, have spent almost every day in her studio cleaning lobster claws and fish bones out of the rope and crocheting it into the chunky scarflike strips, some 150 feet long, that she used as building blocks. "I like getting dirty," Ms. Genger said recently. It makes me feel like there's more freedom to break rules. And on a cloudy day last month, Ms. Genger got dirty with a different crew, this one made up of burly young men who dragged and piled nearly 200 of those strips onto steel supports to create the wavy wall of the red enclosure. Passers-by stopped to stare and take photographs, while Debbie Landau, the director of the conservancy, fretted that the artist, who is just over 5 feet tall, might be pushing herself too hard. Yet Ms. Genger seemed elated. Usually "I'm the first one to see flaws in my work," she said later, as she led the way into the blue piece, which had just been painted. But look at this - it's electric. Around her, the brilliantly colored rope walls looked as if they were writhing. After two years of intense production, sculpturing the work in public was "the fun part," she added. It's frightening and exciting at the same time. She had good reason to be excited. Not only is this Ms. Genger's first major public sculpture in the city where she was born and raised, but she has two other collections on view as well. The dealer Larissa Goldston is showing "Iron Maiden," a group of small metal sculptures cast from superhero figurines and rope, in a pop-up space at 530 West 24th Street through June 22. Ms. Genger also makes knotted rope jewelry in collaboration with the designer Jaclyn Mayer, and their latest line, also inspired by "Red, Yellow and Blue," recently had its debut online at the design showcase Grey Area. As for the installation, it will become the first Madison Square Park commission to travel: Ms. Genger will reinstall it in October at the deCordova Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Mass., where it will remain for a year. For Ms. Genger's supporters, the attention seems well earned. Susan Cross, the Mass MoCA curator who commissioned the massive red piece "Big Boss," called her "a force of nature," adding that her work has broad popular appeal. "Everyone can relate to it, even though it's this overwhelming size," Ms. Cross said. You see that it's rope, but you understand the labor involved. I think that really pulls people in. Lisa Freiman, who heads the department of contemporary art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, singles out Ms. Genger's savvy reworking of art history. "I really see her as one of the most important sculptors working today," she said. From the start, she noted, Ms. Genger has been "taking on classic Minimalist and Postminimalist and feminist art at the same time, and doing it in a completely original way." Building each piece is something of "an endurance performance," said Ms. Freiman, who describes the artist as "one of the toughest makers I know." Yet by her own account, Ms. Genger did not start out that way. Growing up in New York City with parents who collected modern art, she said, she was so shy that she rarely spoke until she was 12. Instead, she said, she drew: "It was kind of a safe space. It was always the thing I felt that I could do well.