Hollywood

Peter Zecher’s three-dimensional cubes and cylinders zooming up from the floor in a long, interconnected vertical line stress the beauty and the pure structural integrity of simplified forms. This is a bare bones approach to sculpture that delights in building abstract, Giacometti-esque metal structures that could theoretically go on forever in an endless telescoping chain.

Zecher’s stacked forms haven’t always had an expansive attitude as earlier work in the exhibit makes clear. Made of ceramic tile, polished wood or angle-cut plastic pipe, the sculptures look tightly compressed from all sides and form a dense geometric mass from identical pieces of industrial material. The newer “Cube Line” pieces maintain their basic form but open it up. The form appears to expand like a sophisticated model for a molecular chain. Compression, suggested by the corner hung “Quadrangle,” is unexpectedly opposed by the Escher-like continuity of shadow and ambiguous form created by the folded mating of two wire mesh tubular chevrons.

Some of Zecher’s newer sculpture has been given a glamorous “public art” veneer by the use of bold electroplated color. Although the bright primarys are appealing, it is the raw metal on the majority of the sculpture that seems most in line with the artist’s concerns for structure reduced down to its essentials.

Zecher’s sculptures, made of mesh, hollow angle iron cut open to further minimize the structure’s mass or metal rings spot welded with flat steel squares, have the intrinsic formality of conceptualism. Their haughty perfection is undercut only slightly by a sense of childlike enjoyment in its sheer ordered simplicity. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., Ends Nov. 5).