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Santa Monica

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Catherine Lee, who lives in New York and London, makes small wall pieces out of a few oddly shaped and individually colored elements nestled closely together.

“Tanto,” one of two works from 1985, is the smallest and quirkiest of the lot. Four thin, irregular ceramic pieces huddle together in a shy and casual sort of way. More recently, Lee has been using bronze (sometimes patinated, sometimes painted) to make works with greater authority.

“Kodiak,” a sloping horizontal fit of three black, rust-colored and slate-blue cliff-shaped pieces, has a pleasingly obdurate density. In “Euston,” the obtuse angle of a five-sided vertical black slab inserts itself into the receptive V-shaped side of its red neighbor. The lines of these pieces have a way of falling away from straightness to bow and bend in subtle ways that add a fine willfulness to their satisfying jigsaw qualities.

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The gallery is also showing a handful of prints in various media and styles by Robert Motherwell. A lithograph from “Madrid Suite” of 1965 is a wide-bordered, teetering triangle on a stem. The figure encloses two irregular ovals “squeezed” in a way that makes empty space curiously palpable. “Tricolor,” a color offset lithograph from 1973, suggests something of the artist’s meticulous collage technique. A fragment of a printed paper in ornate type joins a red block sluiced by white vertical rivers.

In “Primal Sign I,” an aquatint from 1979-80, a hermetic symbol in fat, Sumi brush-style strokes rests on a furry, rust-colored rectangle. Motherwell’s archetypal devouring black blob appears in “Alberti Elegy,” a 1981 lithograph and chine applique in which whitened areas look like cream stirred into coffee. (Maloney Gallery, 910 Colorado Ave., to July 30.)

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