Steeling the Show : John Gilbert Luebtow’s latest pieces are a jarring departure in style and medium from his usual lyrical glass works.

For more than a decade John Gilbert Luebtow has been known for his large glass sculptures with their soft sensuous lines. Indoor and outdoor installations composed of diversely shaped glass pieces absorb, reflect and play with light to convey a happy, joyful spirit.

That’s why this artist’s most recent sculptures are all the more startling. For the past year, he has mustered up knowledge from his 23-year exploration of the glass media’s optical qualities, and put it in the service of expressing his fury with our political system.

In almost every one of the 16 large and small sculptures on view at Kurland / Summers Gallery in the West Hollywood area, a variation of the American flag, fashioned from commercial plate glass, has been twisted, wrapped and bound up with metal cables around a steel tube.

“The cables to me speak of the tension and binding and constricting and taking away freedom,” said Luebtow, 49, who lives in Chatsworth and works in a spacious studio he designed and built behind his house five years ago. He began to think about this series of work when the Persian Gulf War started.

“Was it to control Iraq or Iran or any of those people? Hell no,” he said. “It was to take the American public’s mind off of what was going on here. I had so many problems with Bush and the Republican party in general and that whole Republican convention, for crying out loud. I mean all of our freedoms were being taken away. So that’s where the binding came from, and from the Rodney King incident.”

People familiar with his earlier work were mystified when they saw the new sculptures.

“They said, ‘What the hell happened? Where has this been?’ ” he said. “It’s always been there, but there just hasn’t been the right time to bring it out, or maybe I haven’t felt good enough to bring it out ‘cause this is pretty powerful stuff and pretty challenging, and it also can create a lot of negative energy at the same time.”

Working first on a small scale, he was able to resolve technical problems--”to get these pieces not to break, not to crack,” he said. Among the small sculptures are “Ode to Helms (not the bakery),” and “Ode to Hoover (not the vacuum).”

“Here’s old J. Edgar wrapped up in his little flag and all this chrome and the beauty outside, but he can’t find the truth,” Luebtow said. “I mean we were ripped off for 50 years.”

Before producing the flag in color, he started sandblasting flag images into the clear glass.

“The subtlety of the flag is there, but you don’t see it unless you really look,” he said. “For me, I could just produce a color flag overnight where somebody else would have to do research for six months to figure out how to solve compatibility problems”--that is, fuse and apply color.

Luebtow said the material that the glass surrounds is also an important element of each work. In “What Have We Done to Get Where We Are,” the steel is “flaking and kind of being deformed and destroyed at the same time,” he said. “It’s the internal support, the structure--there’s a lot of symbolism there.

“But also just the visual quality is important because I like what the steel is doing, and I like what the glass and the color and the cable are doing. So it’s an aesthetic statement as well as a social-political statement.”

One of the largest works in the show, more than eight feet tall, is “Family Values.”

“I think it’s the strongest piece. Scale for me has always been important. When you see the little things on the pedestal, they’re neat,” he said. But the large sculptures “cause you to look at the form and the media differently, and they force you to do something with your feelings that cute little things don’t do,” he said.

“What I find most important about John’s work is the scale that he can get out of it,” said Ruth Summers, the gallery director. “He has the largest private furnace of anybody I know in the United States, and is one of the few artists who can work in large scale with commercial plate glass that is heated and manipulated while it’s hot.

“John is very conscious of the human form, and of space and how people relate to the space around them. He has thought out the process of how a large-scale work relates in a human place. Even though it’s 11 feet tall, I don’t feel dwarfed by it.”

Taken aback by the new sculptures when she first saw them because “they are raw and not finished like his other work,” she finds them “exciting, and very powerful,” she said. “They make you think about things.”

Luebtow said he has always been sensitive to what’s going on in the world. He has always had problems with it too, but at different periods in his life he has expressed himself differently.

“Like any human being, I’m multifaceted, especially sensorially,” he said. “During the Vietnam War, I did a whole series of life-size Dachau kind of figures. I built them out of steel armatures and covered them with plaster and then a metal skin over that. They deal with pain and death and agony. They weren’t pretty to look at. They were shocking.

“And then I moved on. I got married and had a son, which really changed the way I perceived what reality was and what I needed to do. Responsibility shifted my ability to be a demonstrator.”

That’s when he began his investigations of glass that led to his more lyrical sculptures.

“I just kind of floated into the media, playing with it and discovering it. I liked what happened,” he said. “I have an affinity toward women. I mean that in the sense that I draw them continuously. The show has drawings of my mother at 79 and drawings of Goldi, my wife. I love the line that comes off of those forms, and the feeling that comes off of them.”

All of his earlier work originates from his drawings of the female nude, from the essence of the line of the female nude, he said. But with the current show, he’s more interested in motivating people to think.

“I’m at a point in my life where I’m able to go against everything that I’ve developed. I feel good about where I am and secure about being able to produce a product that I can live off of,” he said. “But it caters to a specific need. To some people it’s art. To me, it’s a kind of art, but it’s not powerful art. It’s not something you walk into and say, ‘Wow, this grips me.’ ”

Luebtow, who has taught art at the Harvard-Westlake School in North Hollywood (formerly the Harvard School) since 1971, thinks teaching 10th-, 11th- and 12th-graders helps him keep questioning things.

“They’re intellectually together and they’re questioning. They come up and ask you the same old dumb questions that you asked all your life--Why do we do this? What’s it all about?,” he said. “I like that kind of play back and forth.

“When we’re doing pottery, if I feel the situation can be handled, I try to bring in politically sensitive stuff to talk about. Some of them say, ‘C’mon, we get that from TV and the newspapers. This is a fun class.’ I say, ‘Yeah, but art isn’t fun. Art deals with reality and that’s the difference.’

“They come into my class and say, ‘I’m taking an art class.’ I say, ‘No you’re not. You’re taking a technique class. I’m going to teach you how to do something and it’s not art.’ Art transcends what you’re doing. Art takes intellect, feeling and sensitivity. It takes a personal perspective and transferring that perspective to a form. They just kind of go, ‘You mean it’s really that complicated? You mean all these little pots aren’t art?’ ”

Where and When What: “New Sculpture by John Gilbert Luebtow.” Location: Kurland/Summers Gallery, 8742A Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. Hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday through April 15. Call: (310) 659-7098.