DOWNTOWN

New York artist Roni Horn has introduced her work to Los Angeles in the form of one small lead sculpture--displayed alone on the floor in the center of a spacious gallery--and, in an adjacent room, six little dry-pigment drawings. A thin debut? Not if you value art that enlists the sparest possible means to evoke maximum human presence.

If Horn is a Minimalist, she’s not of the sterile, industrial variety that hones art to a pristine geometry. Her art looks like concentrated vulnerability. To describe her cast volume of lead by its smooth, flat, blemished top, its ragged edges and its rough sides (tapering down to a narrow, irregular footprint) is not to account for its fragile aura or the pull of this odd-shaped chunk of heavy gray material. We wouldn’t notice it in cluttered surroundings, but isolated and centered in the gallery, it exerts an undeniable attraction toward viewers who almost inevitably allow it a reverential distance.

The drawings, however, bring people up close to examine dense little shapes layered with color and silvery metallic powder and surrounded by thumb smudges. These quivering mounds, notched lumps and hollows have been intensely worked on individual pieces of paper, later cut and joined to make rhythmic progressions or tight abutments. Despite their rather disheveled appearance, there is nothing casual about these drawings. Horn has constructed them deliberately and with extraordinary sensitivity. (Burnett Miller Gallery, 2511 W. 7th St, to April 27.)