Rachel Whiteread at Gagosian Gallery

Even on its grandest scale -- the size of a house -- Rachel Whiteread‘s work has a deeply affecting humility. It is, after all, based on absence. The British artist, who lives and works in London, has made casts (in plaster, concrete, resin and other materials) of the interior of a room, a house, a water tower, the underside of a staircase, the space beneath a chair. Her work is not just a matter of coy reversal, turning negative space into palpable volume, but an ongoing meditation on containment, memory, place, form, density and touch.

Whiteread’s first solo show in L.A., at Gagosian, extends that investigation while bringing it down to its most intimate level yet. The 25 sculptures have a modesty about them but also an unflagging integrity -- a tender, abject beauty and even a bit of playfulness. The show is a tremendous opportunity to see an artist of established profundity stretch and shift and experiment.

Whiteread trained initially as a painter, and that background resurfaces here with a thrilling vengeance. A series of sculptural arrangements on eye-level shelves resonates mightily with Giorgio Morandi’s humble, poetic still lifes. Morandi created his compositions from a variety of vases, boxes and pitchers in his studio -- ordinary objects that he grouped in small clusters, often evoking a sense of vulnerability.

Whiteread builds her shelf pieces from casts she’s made of assorted packing materials -- cardboard tubes, polystyrene corners, boxes -- in pigmented plaster and resin as well as bronze. She stacks the objects, lines them up in rows, leans them into one another. As in Morandi’s quiet visions, Whiteread’s arrangements generate a subtle synergy.

The matte, chalky plaster objects offset the luminous, translucent pieces cast in resin (and looking, variously, like glycerin soap, wax or rubber). Pale, dilute, smoky colors edge up against buzzing, vibrant hues. A painterly sense of internal motion, of colors and shapes receding and coming forward, animates the compositions. So does a musical sense of rhythm and interval, tension and release.

In “Colours,” six small buff-colored box forms and three cylindrical tubes (dusty mauve, rosy gray, ocher) rest atop a concrete-colored slab. The objects all lean slightly, as if in italics. The casts made of castoffs align, as if just for the moment, into a neat, tight little formal poem.

The 18 squat cylindrical forms in “Line Up” stretch across their shelf like jaunty misfits, exuberantly flaunting their imperfections, their crusty edges and mismatched height. This is Morandi carbonated -- still modest, still intimate, but with a fizzier sense of joy.

One of the enduring threads through Whiteread’s work has been a building-block quality of construction. The shelf sculptures were born of such serious play and provisionality, as were several other sculptural groupings, the cityscape-like “Untitled (Mix)” and the humble stack, “Cairn.” So too were a series of works on paper, but to far slighter effect. For these, Whiteread paired collaged reproductions of antique glass cups, goblets, vases and bowls with painted, overlapping rectangles of color. The pieces hint at the lyrical but lack the gorgeous tactility and emotional resonance of her sculptural work.

Whiteread has paid homage to Bruce Nauman’s early castings, but from the start her sensibility has reflected her idiosyncratic mix of interests in the indexical, the physical trace, the empty and the full. One of the most powerful works in this remarkable show is “Ghost, Ghost,” a polyurethane cast of a dollhouse. Whiteread collects old, handmade dollhouses and recently has begun to exhibit them in hauntingly lighted, village-like installations.

“Ghost, Ghost” refers back to “Ghost,” her 1990 plaster cast of an entire room, and to the echoes that lived experience sends through time and space. An old dollhouse packs a nostalgic charge to begin with. Whiteread’s cast of it amplifies that charge exquisitely. The structure is translucent as ice, and decorative surface patterns and an interior staircase whisper from within.

Whiteread, who made a significant Holocaust memorial in Vienna in 2000, has created a domestic memorial in “Ghost, Ghost” -- a spectral relic, a powerful presence that conjures its own absence, an object suffused with loss.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Dec. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.gagosian.com.

The big picture of ‘Civilization’

Marco Brambilla‘s newest video work, “Civilization (Megaplex),” is a brilliant tour de force, a 2 1/2 -minute extravaganza so dense with imagery, references and associations that it begs to be watched again and again. After repeated cycles, the work still feels inexhaustible.

The Italian-born, L.A.-based Brambilla has dazzled before with complex video installations that often riff on the vexed appeal of spectacle and the seductions of mediated experience. “Civilization” takes on the big picture -- heaven, hell and what lies in the middle. It’s an amazing tapestry woven from snippets of 300 films, recent and older, domestic and foreign, mainstream and cult, set to an excerpt from Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”

Brambilla integrates the clips into an expansive landscape that, projected in the size of a small movie screen, continuously scrolls downward, starting with the belching fires of hell and hate, then progressing through the realm of labor and order on to leisure and celestial reward. Just before the cycle repeats, we see a row of figures (angels?) scattering fake snow onto the heavens.

Everything in the work is fake/staged, but the way representations of reality (or fear or fantasy) blur with the real thing is part of what gives Brambilla’s work its power. Ironic or not, an authenticity comes from this aggregate of our contrived visions.

A second work, “Cathedral,” shown in the back gallery on a flat-screen monitor, has a quieter, more studious feel. Brambilla filmed Christmas shoppers in a Canadian mall and used the footage as raw material for a long, slow sequence of kaleidoscopic patterning. Images mirror, repeat and invert. The result is a technologically upgraded version of the cut-paper snowflake -- a little marvel, but yet another mildly disturbing take on familiar comforts.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Nov. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cgrimes.com.

The serious meets the silly

A slightly dark charm permeates the images of Ryan Mrozowski, a young Brooklyn-based painter showing at Daniel Weinberg. Things occur just beyond the scope of logic or in quantities that crowd out reason. There is no security in numbers, only a compounded curiousness.

In one of the modest-sized paintings, what seem like too many gleaming yellow windows punctuate the dark silhouette of an oversized house, like inescapable eyes in a haunted tale. In another, Mrozowski paints a huge heap of chairs in a retro palette of rich earthy browns, glowing amber, ivory and pale blue, coyly titling the piece “Chairpile (From Now On We Will Have to Stand).”

Mrozowski stages sober jokes, odd assemblies. One resembles a dog show, but alongside the large black pets on curtained platforms stand several identical men with raised batons, as if conducting. Realities collapse in tableau after tableau. The carnivalesque meets the athletic, which collides with the academic. Gravity competes against the absurd.

What also lifts the work from the merely cartoonish is Mrozowski’s gorgeous sense of color and his seductively smooth, streaky surfaces. With their brownish casts, the paintings seem to wear a veil of authenticity, a varnish of authority that gives their humor some depth.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 954-8425, through Nov. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.www.danielweinberggallery.com.

An ancient city’s transformation

There is a new international style in architecture, but this one has less to do with aesthetics than expediency. Bland, efficient and anonymous, it has, as seen in a series of remarkable photographs at Shoshana Wayne, taken root in the cities of China, where it is replicating and spreading like a virus.

The pictures, by Sze Tsung Leong, document this moment of burgeoning change as the new crowds out the old, the massive extinguishes the intimate and the generic dwarfs the particular. In one photograph, high-rise apartment buildings that look as if they could have sprouted anywhere in the world loom over the corroded remains of a centuries-old Beijing neighborhood. Sections of the traditional tile roofs have collapsed and many of the walls have dissolved into rubble, but lights still shine in a few of the condemned buildings and laundry still hangs in a shadowy courtyard.

The violent thrust of economic “progress” is tragic to behold in a view overlooking a town destroyed by the construction of the infamous Three Gorges Dam. What’s left of the town, on the banks of the Yangtze, looks like the site of a natural disaster, as if an immense force had chewed it up and spit it out.

Leong was born in Mexico City and now lives in New York. His photographs match the scale (the largest prints are 6 by 7 feet) and extraordinary detail of Andreas Gursky’s, but they surpass the German photographer’s in their implicit humanism. Leong’s chronicle reads as an extended poem of loss, an ode to passing textures, a glimpse of history from the perspective of the architecturally vanquished.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Nov. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.www.shoshanawayne.com.