Wilshire Center

Young New York sculptor Adam Curtis looks back wistfully to Giacometti’s wheel forms and Brancusi’s salt-of-the-earth columnar structures with a personal detour into comic-book mishap. The borrowings tend to be dismayingly obvious, but at his best Curtis marshals large, simple forms effectively, retaining the welcome tension of slight, “handcrafted” irregularities.

“Totem,” which is nearly eight feet tall, is an upside-down pyramidal form in thick, cracked wood that rests on a rusted steel base. “Obelisque on Wheel II” has the look of an arrested circus act, a black column “riding” on a wheel set into a concrete base. In Curtis’ fanciful studies for the piece, the obelisk is pink and the wheel is unanchored in space. Drawings for “Totem” similarly heighten the dramatic possibilities of the piece with artificial contrasts of light and shadow, suggesting a certain frustration with the limitations of three-dimensional form.

And the pop disaster? Well, there’s a black wooden aircraft stuck in a columnar structure mounted on a rusted base (“Plane in Temple”), a melding of modern “accident” with classic permanence that collapses into a lame one-liner. (Turske & Whitney Gallery, 962 N. La Brea Ave., to Sept. 3.)