SANTA MONICA

Norman Sunshine’s large painted steel relief sculptures are airy tossed salads of shapes whose ancestors were Matisse cutouts. Crustaceans mingle with broken bottles, suntan oil containers, combs, shovel tips, bits of camera film, bent screws, plastic six-pack dividers and other less identifiable flotsam.

In his collages, Sunshine necessarily abandons the four-leveled suspended construction that gives the reliefs their buoyancy. Rendered in a much smaller scale and flattened down on paper, the same brightly colored motifs unfortunately tend to look banal and landlocked.

Three bronzes created by intertwining some of the same shapes reveal how dependent these silhouettes are on local color and how contrived they look when obliged to serve as building blocks for an abstract work of art. When the lifeguard’s station on long, spindly legs from the “Topanga” relief reappears in one of the bronzes, for example, its vernacular jauntiness hardens into rigid decoration. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, to Nov. 9.)