Santa Monica

Self-taught and adamantly not a hothouse aesthete--despite his heavy-duty theoretical interests--A. R. Penck makes work with a muscular vitality and approachability rare among his Continental peers. (Born in Dresden, he now lives in Dublin, London and Dusseldorf.)

The familiar, gangly stick-figures and private symbols that populate most of his paintings combine the unaffected, story-telling directness of children’s art with a forthright sociopolitical program rooted in studies of human behavior and the workings of language. In recent paintings and wood sculpture, Penck’s own visual vocabulary continues to pump strength into the Neo-Expressionist creed.

A series of small self-portraits contain schematic assemblies of crudely stylized facial features--railroad-tie teeth, football-shaped mouth, X-slashed diamond-shaped eye--with an effect that ranges from caricature to a totemic harshness with antecedents in Picasso.

The allegorical side of Penck’s work surfaces in “How It Works,” with a huge red bear (ancient symbol of Berlin) attacking a frightened-looking donkey under a green sky sprinkled with symbols: a spread-winged Nazi eagle, a skull, a target and warring stick figures.

In “The Battle,” an 11 1/2-foot-long canvas, the artist weaves a dense and spirited tapestry of culturally meaningful imagery ranging from a dollar sign and a yin/yang symbol to a lush all-red female nude, a childlike animal stick figure and a profiled head in a worker’s cap.

The pedestal sculptures--deeply undercut, gouged into brutal twists and turns--point up the visceral, inquisitive, honest-labor aspects of Penck’s work, surely among its major strengths. (Fred Hoffman Gallery, 912 Colorado Ave., to March 4.)