LA CIENEGA AREA

The modern Everyman is a clean-shaven chap in a baggy suit and discouraged tie who works at a job that his children cannot describe and his wife will not describe as she is out shopping for useful but equally anonymous goods. This little family is endlessly satirized by bohemians and intellectuals as leading pointless, boring and impotent lives.

But wait. Is this not also the same chap who is forever dropping dead of a stroke at age 48? Is this not the same wife who takes endless evening classes until she can get her own job and break up the family in a burst of liberation? Are these not the same children who alarm the society by ingesting massive amounts of proscribed substances?

Who says there’s no drama in the suburbs?

Not Viola Frey. The veteran Bay Area sculptor has concocted an exhibition that will surely stand among the most interesting of the year, even this early in spring. It treats the modern corporate Everyman on a par with the Pharaohs of Egypt, the heroes of the Iliad and the shamans of the primitive tribes, and it makes its point.

Most impressive and telling are five colossal figures, each nearly 10 feet tall, made--like the rest--of glazed ceramic. It is a goggling technical feat, but that wouldn’t count if its expressive vectors were not so chillingly on target. By sheer scale these giant little folks are so oppressively authoritarian that one is reminded of every gumshoe bureaucrat conformist middle-management nerd that ever struck absolute terror into a freedom-loving heart: junior high school teachers, DMV examiners, IRS men . . . Talk about power! In a work called “Mean Man,” Frey underscores her point by painting a large chicken on his back.

Smaller examples like “Stacked Men With Reclining Figure” become allegories of the primal competition for sex and money that is tucked into the bland surface of modest lives. Frey is best known as a species of Neo-Folk sculptor. This is the most openly sophisticated group of works I have ever seen her make. It might have been inspired by the County Museum of Art’s masterful “German Expressionist Sculpture” exhibition, with a few dollops of Leger and Dubuffet thrown in for spice, along with a generous soupcon of Neo-Expressionism for timeliness.

But it doesn’t look derivative, because it isn’t. Frey continues to convince us that her work is her own. She persuades us never ever again to snigger at the guy in the Hush Puppies taking the family to Sea World. He is Hector, she is Helen and they are the Fates in adolescence. (Asher/Faure, 612 N. Almont Drive, to April 12.)