La Cienega Area

Yale-educated, New York-based sculptor John Newman continues to make exquisite, just-smaller-than-human-scale sculptures that wed the pristine industrial finishes of the ‘70s with a new brand of biomorphic abstraction. We have seen new figurative art and new geometric art. “New biomorphic art” has slowly evolved since the mid-’80s, represented in the fine paintings of local artist Marc Pally and New Yorker Terry Winters. In sculpture, Newman is probably one of its most eloquent spokespersons.

In “Inside the Cylindrical Mirror,” Newman patinates cast aluminum to a lush sultry blue and makes a central, blown-glass glob look like molten organic matter, coiling and folding over itself to make a structure like the cochlea of the ear or a precious charm meant to dangle from a giant’s necklace. Hovering below eye level in a corner, the lumbering yet graceful work defies gravity on one wall, while sending out a small lateral compartment to push on the adjacent wall.

“(Blue) Brazen Sphere” in cast and fabricated aluminum is propped on the gallery floor and opens out onto itself like a mechanical yet believably organic pod with an internal pistil-like tube made from glistening metal rods. A third very fine sculpture and two diagrammatic drawings of complex organic inventions--woven wombs, hive-like vessels--fill out this excellent show.

This is tight, analytical work intimately tied to concerns for process and materials--and unimaginable without the structural and conceptual groundwork laid by the Minimalists. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, to Aug. 20.)