Now in his 80s, Gordon Newell is...

Now in his 80s, Gordon Newell is a veteran California sculptor known for large outdoor works that fuse figurative, architectural and totemic elements that often have a sinewy elegance. He fits firmly into the modernist tradition, balancing the geometric with the organic, the representational with the purely abstract. Although this sounds like predictable formal territory, Newell rarely sinks into cliche. His work retains a reductive starkness that counterpoints the allure of its polished, chemically induced patinas and white-painted surfaces.

Newell’s recent smaller sculptures and maquettes in bronze and painted steel lack the environmental impact of his larger works, but they do provide insight.

His starting point is usually an arch or bird, from which he stylizes hard edges, smooth curves and enveloping masses that appear naturally rather than being imposed from without. Newell avoids the passive “objectness” that usually dogs work of this kind.

Also on display are paintings by local artist Ernest Wrege. Entitled “Brazil, Real and Imagined,” the works attempt to metamorphose personal reminiscences into the spiritual mystification of a country.

Wrege’s visual strategy appears to be the contrived Photo-Realism of the holiday snapshot or tourist poster. At their worst--hackneyed views of airships over Rio, sentimentalized locals set against Bahia rooftops--the works are little more than literal remembrances of journeys past. At their best--a carnival brochure/paper airplane floating across a landscape, the artist sipping drinks with Trotsky at a sidewalk cafe--they suggest that Wrege might be a better ironist than realist. (Ankrum Gallery, 657 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Jan. 31.)