La Cienega Area

Kathi Jacobi paints amazing gnomish babies tooled from her familiar style that includes dramatic, single-source light and strong, robust anatomy cast in iridescent silvery hues like a trout’s under belly or peacock’s tail.

She’s fascinated by portraits embellished and reinterpreted to reveal Freudian dichotomies: the child and the adult, the victim and perpetrator in all of us.

Jacobi’s beautifully rendered nude babies isolated on ebony or molten red grounds are built from a few well-placed, instinctively felt contours, with enormous, lumbering appendages and sinister faces. “Baby Sucking Her Fist” should be a cuddly portrait. Instead it looks sober as a wizened Roman patrician.

Jacobi’s work isn’t a faddish fine art version of Hollywood’s current fascination with babies. Asked “why paint babies,” Jacobi writes eloquently that she paints them because they are tiny blank slates, quintessentially internal and egocentric--mirrors of all that we are and can be. This could be dicey ground for a lesser artist, but Jacobi’s knack for probing the human form and psyche makes these excellent, eerie paintings work.

Also shown are Terry Stringer’s less interesting bronze busts and smaller sculptures that work metal filaments (and wood accents) like a drawing to outline two-dimensional still-lifes in “Fallen Jug,” “Lilly in Glass,” “Napkin and Wine Glass.” (Ankrum Gallery, 657 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Dec. 24.)