Santa Monica

A fixture on the postwar American sculpture scene, Richard Stankiewicz was also an extraordinary draftsman. Around 1960, he was guiding ink into striking silhouettes that hint at objects but pull back just in time.

A drooping mass hangs like slab of meat; a telephone pole-vertical pulls a fretwork of radiating black splinters; a nozzle-shape sweeps into a graceful curve, a Gottlieb-like tangle floating over a black pathway--these are machine or landscape glimpses transformed into a reductive private language. In another batch, done on thinner, torn-edge paper, ink fans out in soft, furry pools.

Still other drawings are confrontations of large shapes that toss out stinging needle sprays and rivulets of ink or tiny galaxies of blots. There is great passion here, elegance and grit. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., to March 15.)