Santa Monica

West German assemblage artist Michael Schultze creates strictly German, Brothers Grimm sorts of fairy tales that can be fantastic, terrifying and beautiful at once.

Part machine, part bone, feather and fur Schultze’s critters are frighteningly primal creatures evolved from an urban landfill. They have wheels for feet or nurse their metallic young on metal teats. Their gears-for-guts construction and handy cranks encourage the viewer to grant them brief moments of life. Occasionally that life has a menacing edge. In “Pigs in a Bathtub” a crank turns a bicycle wheel inside a hog that drives a thick screw in and out of it’s mouth like a butcher’s saw carving from the inside. Pointedly the animator turning the crank is as threatened by the tongue/screw as the animal.

There is something of Hieronymus Bosch to Schultze’s improbable animals that dress dire warnings in animal hide pulled over hellish contraptions of lead and wood. Yet their demeanor, often aggressive, also has the fragile quality of unprotected nature. Silently they seem to appeal for their own lives while trying to integrate the intricacies of human intervention. (Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., to Oct. 21.)