BEVERLY HILLS

In “Crosscurrents,” her latest exhibit of stainless steel and brass sculptures, Lila Katzen presents a cross section of work from the last four years, juxtaposing her usual synthesis of organic forms and technological materials with recent researches into African and Mayan motifs.

With its mirrored and textured surfaces, clean, hard edges and graceful curves, Katzen’s work mines a particularly modernist vocabulary. It is aggressive, tough and smoothly muscular, yet also delicate, ornamental and sensuous, largely by virtue of its Oriental allusions. Thus, “Samurai” can evoke stacked armor with Zen-like understatement while “Silver Tree,” with its metallic, leafy appendages, imbues harmless vegetation with the distinct menace of razor-edge swords.

This masculine/feminine yin-yang of aggression and nurture is developed further in a recent, cross-cultural series of masks that explore the violent imagery of Yucatan’s Mayan-Toltec sites. By focusing as much on the interior curve of the mask (the womb?) as the ferocious outward “face,” and exaggerating the unabashed opulence of both decoration and form, Katzen is able to assimilate even the most feared iconography into her conceptual taming of male dominance through exoticism.

Also on display is a series of nine maplike drawings by conceptual artist Anthony Austin. British-born Austin investigates current theories of physics through a narrative sequence of image and text, in this case Einstein’s unified field theory and space-time curvature. Einstein (an ecstatic, Dali-like figure), a dismembered Volkswagen engine and various symbolic references to both objective and mystical worlds float through space-time as a whimsical metaphor for the reunification of energy from present chaos.

The work is also about mapping fractured light, underlining the human need to rationalize an unseeable simultaneity in the form of seemingly logical progressions. Thus, despite its abstruse roots, Austin’s art is essentially about the complexity of seeing and the artist’s role of creating order from chaos: a neat, self-reflexive injection of purist Modernism into the infinite cosmic “plan.” (Stella Polaris Gallery, 445 S. Beverly Drive, to April 8.)