ART REVIEW : ‘Facts and Figures’ That Add Up to a Picture of Ambiguity

“Facts and Figures: Selections From the Lannan Foundation Collection” is a rich, stimulating exhibition in which numbers don’t add up and facts never speak for themselves.

Inspiring profound doubt, this 14-artist show also invites poetic license. As viewers are called upon to interpret its 45 representational images, subjective impulses intermingle with mute objectivity, charging the installation with psychological complexity.

Jim Shaw’s small, flat-footed pencil drawings of newspaper pictures, Vija Celmins’ meditative painting of the night sky and Thomas Ruff’s gigantic, passport-style photos of expressionless German youths treat their subjects neutrally. Simultaneously, these works declare that facts are not neutral entities that can be precisely calculated.

Gary Hill’s two video installations amplify the ambiguity at the root of human experience. In “Tall Ships,” viewers enter a long, dark corridor on the walls of which are projected 12 separate images of ordinary people standing or sitting in the distance. As you pass each one, it appears to come forth from the void. These ghostly figures walk back into the shadows only after you turn away, creating an unsettling, mirror-relationship between their spectral intangibility and your fleshy mortality.

Hill’s “Inasmuch as It Is Always Already Taking Place” internalizes the sense of dislocation and missed communication central to “Tall Ships.” Consisting of 16 disemboweled monitors and a tangle of cables set in a deep niche, this piece of self-portraiture intimates that human bodies are mysterious landscapes, to which their inhabitants pay too little attention.

Likewise, Chuck Close’s gridded, part-by-part portrait of painter Alex Katz painstakingly measures the distance between a person and his physical appearance. “American Costume,” David Hammons’ monoprint of his face surrounded by his fingerprints in the shape of an Afro, poignantly marks the territory where self-determination collides with social prejudice.

Cindy Sherman’s five black-and-white photographs of her face, made up to look like five different people, humorously records how individual identity forms at the points where stereotypes break down. Putting a hilarious spin on the idea that commonly accepted facts were once outlandish fictions, Jeffrey Vallance’s “Relics From Two Vatican Performances” locates myth-making power in the hands of creative observers.

Gerhard Richter’s paintings of sexy women and of a heavily lipsticked mouth link the show to Andy Warhol’s art, where the embrace of superficiality was loaded with ambivalence. Always ambiguous, the pictures in “Facts and Figures” begin where objectivity falls short and metaphors take over.

* Lannan Foundation, 5401 McConnell Ave., Marina del Rey, (310) 306-1004, through Feb . 26.