Joel Shapiro’s Sculptures Embody Joy of Movement

Joel Shapiro’s bronze sculptures at PaceWildenstein Gallery are both highly traditional and profoundly contemporary. Doing what figurative sculptures have done for centuries, but in ways that are unmistakably of the moment, these blocky works use an easy-to-understand vocabulary to express some fundamental emotions about what it’s like to live in a body.

Simultaneously abstract and anthropomorphic, each of the lively figures by the 54-year-old, New York-based artist consists of five or six segments cast from beams of wood that resemble refined railroad ties. Joined at odd angles, these rectangular components outline the basic architecture of the human form: limbs extending from both ends of a torso (or trunk).

Walking around Shapiro’s handsomely installed show makes you feel like a kid at a circus. Not only do its six solid-looking figures physically dwarf you--their arms reach above the height of a basketball hoop--they often amuse and sometimes amaze with their gravity-defying gracefulness.

Like a troupe of talented acrobats who tumble, jump and spring around the room, Shapiro’s sculptures celebrate the body’s mobility and the delight spectators naturally take in watching experts push the human physique to its limits. The innocent experience of joy is embodied--and elicited--by these simple pieces.

It’s significant that none of Shapiro’s user-friendly sculptures include references to the human head. As a result, his works are reversible: It takes no great leap of the imagination to see one prancing figure with its arms stretched toward the ceiling as a performer doing a handstand; or another, in the middle of a somersault, to appear to have either its hip or its shoulder touching the ground.

Shapiro’s headless figures invite your body to respond before your mind has a chance to figure out what’s taking place. Similarly, nine large drawings in an upstairs gallery transform the cerebral appeal of Suprematist art’s utopianism into a playful series of corporeal exercises rooted in the present.

As entertaining as animated cartoons, Shapiro’s drawings, like his sculptures, embody the wonder of ordinary human movement like walking, running and reaching, as well as its more elaborate variations like dancing, leaping and cartwheeling. A big part of his art’s beauty stems from the fact that you don’t have to be an expert to share in its pleasures.

* PaceWildenstein Gallery, 9540 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 205-5522, through April 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Scratching the Surface: Thomas Nozkowski is an abstract painter who never repeats himself yet manages to make captivating images with impressive consistency. Every one of his 16 small oils on canvas board at Ace Gallery, though finished over the past six years, seems as if it could be the touchstone for an entire body of work from a much longer span of time, or even belong to different artists’ oeuvres.

In one compact picture, three crisp ellipses are superimposed over a shadow possibly cast by strangely shaped vessels perched on a spindly legged table behind louver blinds. In another, a multicolored eye, or maybe a button, inhabits a dark circle amid a roughly textured, seemingly weathered terrain.

Other images combine quirky, cartoonish symbols and incoherent logos in a rich palette indebted to Arthur Dove and in patterns that recall Paul Klee’s lively ciphers. Looking at Nozkowski’s paintings has the feel of barely scratching the surface. These are works you can go back to again and again; each time, they’re slightly yet significantly different.

As a result, Nozkowski’s show keeps you on your toes. No overriding principle--other than the passionate pursuit of idiosyncrasy--can be discerned in these self-sufficient images. They don’t build on each other’s formal discoveries or logically progress toward some grand resolution, but hang patiently on the wall like a random sampling of bus passengers momentarily thrown together for a trip across town.

Indeed, Nozkowski’s paintings seem somewhat uncomfortable, even temporarily out of place, in an austere art gallery. Unlike works that are made for public display, his intimate pictures beg to be taken home and lived with, along with lamps and tables and dishes and windows.

They imply a sort of institutional critique that works on purely practical terms. Preferring the happenstance of daily life to the cool neutrality of the institution, Nozkowski’s scrappy little paintings take their chances with vernacular readings and thrive in domestic settings.

* Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., 2nd floor, (213) 935-4411, through April. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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In the Flesh: John Coplans’ unglamorous black-and-white photographs of his naked and doughy 75-year-old body provide a humbling antidote to the handsome hunks usually portrayed by this type of show-all/show-off imagery. Even if that’s all they did, they’d merit attention.

But the artist’s stark grids of flabby flesh are also both gross and engrossing. Powerful works of art, they cannot be reduced to simple moral lessons or be described as realistic illustrations of the inevitable toll time takes on every body.

At Patricia Faure Gallery, Coplans’ close-ups of his pasty white flesh--from armpits to toes--possess not a trace of self-pity, self-satisfaction or self-aggrandizement. Literally faceless and stoically self-effacing, these multi-part self-portraits are not about the heroically antiheroic aging of a modern Everyman, despite the claims often made for them.

Instead, Coplans’ photos are about growing old and enjoying it. These are not pictures of some old geezer reveling in his decrepitude, but fun-loving images of what flesh feels like from the inside after three-quarters of a century.

Each frame of Coplans’ six-, nine- and 12-part composites is carefully (and often humorously) composed. Classical Greek friezes get playfully reconfigured, as do sumptuous odalisques, vulnerable youths, abstract landscapes, colossal icons and Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential stop-action images.

Time-traveling with gleeful abandon, Coplans proposes that the stages people pass through as they age are not lost but buried deep in the psyche. His ambitious art goes further to suggest that the past one hasn’t even experienced firsthand also lies buried there, awaiting exploration.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through April 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.