THE ABSTRACT SHAPES OF FAMILIAR MYSTERIES

A large, black mound rises abruptly from the concrete floor of the Margo Leavin Gallery. One side of the dark mass is a round, wooden paint-streaked panel. The rest of its roughly rounded contours are defined by a rigid skin of tarred screening that grudgingly allows light to penetrate a shadowy interior.

Not far from the looming mound, an angular wooden fin seems to pierce the gallery floor, as if a giant fish had ascended from murky depths of the ocean and surfaced in West Hollywood.

A bulbous wire form hangs heavily from a wall of the gallery, as if weighted down by invisible cargo. On the opposite wall hangs a lineup of “Boys’ Toys,” a rather whimsical assortment of hollow, long-necked objects that vaguely allude to weapons and phalluses.

All these sculptural constructions--and others--are the work of Martin Puryear in a show called “Nature and Artifice,” at Leavin’s new Hilldale Avenue showcase through Feb. 16. They compose a sensitively measured installation of abstract objects that are simultaneously mysterious and familiar.

“I mistrust loading my work up with mystery intentionally, but I do believe that I tap an intuitive part of my brain when I make it,” Puryear said, in an interview at the gallery.

It figures. A soft-spoken, self-contained man who ardently believes that “the doing is much more important than the talking,” Puryear is reluctant to ascribe qualities of “magic” to art but quick to acknowledge the meanings and ideas that arise naturally from hand-honed abstractions.

“For me, the work is about form. Associations (with recognizable subject matter) are inevitable human reactions from people who have grown up with a figurative or representational tradition, but I prefer when people say they get a feeling from the work instead of a specific interpretation.

“References (to other objects or beings) are left open on purpose. Titles (such as “Lurk,” the name of a hollow wooden arc whose hard-edged exterior form houses an amorphous, dark interior) are entrances or clues. When work is as evocative as this, you shouldn’t be left dangling (without a title), but I don’t like to lock the work up too closely because that’s part of the richness.”

Puryear, who left New York for Chicago three years ago to accept a faculty post at the University of Illinois, has become an increasingly familiar figure in the East, but his current show is his first solo appearance in Los Angeles. It follows a growing awareness of his work, first in group shows, then in a full-dress review at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

Olympics fans became acquainted with Puryear last summer through his image of a lanky black runner striding across the country on one of the Games’ most warm-spirited and popular posters.

Puryear’s exhibition at Leavin, consisting of objects made during the last year and a half, “spans a range” of his oeuvre, according to the artist. “It covers two poles: linear pieces, of which the rings are best known, and monolithic solids that have a silhouette so dense that it’s always changing. The work here mediates between those two things.

“There’s a change here too,” Puryear continued, surveying the exhibition in the spacious, high-ceilinged showcase. “A lot of my work has been seamless in the past; the new pieces have angles and facets. In a small way, they relate to tool marks and, in a large way, to polyhedrons and contours.”

Asked about the evolution of sculptures that range in feeling from portentous to light-hearted, he said, “They happen all kinds of ways--sometimes through material knocking around the studio, through an idea that overlaps with material or through calculations. The ‘Boys’ Toys’ are from memories. There’s not any pattern.

“Ironically, I like the constructed process, because it’s germane to our time, but my work is organic. I like a sense of wholeness, where the work’s origin is contained in it.”

Critics have noted a strain of primitive art in Puryear’s work, and a piece of his was in the contemporary portion of the Museum of Modern Art’s widely acclaimed and often controversial exhibition, “ ‘Primitivism’ and 20th-Century Art.”

“That was MOMA’s number,” he said. “The show made most sense in dealing with the direct influences of primitive art on modern work. I think there is a quality of the raw that Western art has been trying to capture for a long time, but it was handled glibly. The part of the show my work was in, the ‘Affinities’ section, was on thin ice. I have a lot of questions about that interface.”

Puryear says he is a product of a “typical” university art education: undergraduate work at Catholic University in Washington, two years of study at the Royal Academy in Stockholm and graduate school at Yale. Beginning as a painter who believed that “the measure of one’s ability was the ability to faithfully reproduce reality,” he had to endure the “painful” process of learning that “there was a level beyond that.”

“The lesson is still very real because I learned abstraction as a process, unlike people who just decide to paint Abstract Expressionist paintings,” he said.

Painting eventually gave way to sculpture, and meticulous realism to evocative organic abstraction. His trademark woodworking is something he “picked up” on his own, while a stint in the Peace Corps (in Sierra Leone) reinforced his appreciation for handwork and “independence from technology.” Though he recently outfitted himself with a “proper shop” and power tools, his love for raising art from hand-hewn material remains a passion.

“When I was little, I was extremely conscious of materials, of how things were made and put together. That’s still at the top of my interest,” Puryear reflected. “I’ve always made things, even functional things like furniture, although that’s a complete break from art. Recently, I’ve become involved in planning environments--articulating public spaces that will be enticing, not just well appointed. I feel like I’m developing a range from crafted small objects to large spaces to be experienced by non-initiates.”

As for the steady increase of notice his work has been attracting, Puryear said, “I just think it’s an amazing gift. That people receive what you do from a depth of spirit is a real gift. I never thought it was a right. I still feel lucky.”