Sculpture of Disorienting Scale, Subtle Tension

Fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm meet those of contemporary art in the sculpture of German artist Stephan Balkenhol--and why not? All three spent their formative teen years in the once-lovely, now gritty town of Kassel. Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm are local heroes. For Balkenhol, 45, Kassel meant youthful immersion in Documenta 4, the legendary exhibition of Post-Minimal and Conceptual art that galvanized many who saw it.

At Regen Projects, Balkenhol’s latest batch of carved wood sculpture is dominated by “Big Man & Small Man,” a two-part work abutting a wall. As with all his titles, this one is a blunt description that slowly turns into an enigma.

The bigger man--standing on his floor-bound pedestal, he’s 8 feet tall--looks slightly younger than the smaller man, who’s diminutive at just over 41/2 feet. The smaller figure is hung high on the wall, which yields two disconcerting effects: His head is on about the same level as that of the bigger man, who looks over his shoulder at him, and, visually, the smaller man recedes in space, as if he’s off in the distance and the bigger man is up close.

Where does that locate the viewer? You find yourself navigating the room in search of a comfortable place to stand in relation to these figures; the sculpture might be anchored to the wall, but it keeps you moving. Balkenhol plays with perception of scale in ways that physically disorient your body. Never life-size, his sculptures of people nonetheless get under your skin.

Six sculptures, three carved reliefs and two drawings (white crayon on sheets of wood painted black) make up this show of new work, Balkenhol’s fourth at the gallery. As always, the sculptures are roughly but elegantly chiseled from rectangular blocks of wood and painted in flat, uninflected color. The method might be folkloric, but the art certainly isn’t. The men wear nondescript uniforms of urban modernity: white shirt, black pants, brown shoes. Sophisticated totems, they’re closer in style and feeling to the paintings of Alex Katz than to the carved and painted Expressionist sculptures of Balkenhol’s countryman, Georg Baselitz.

Five chest-high posts feature small male figures on top. One stands on his head. One lies on his back with his arms and feet up, echoing the form of the post. A third appears to teeter on a thin red line. A fourth leans back as if off-balance. None of these simple, even slightly goofy calisthenics is of course genuine, since the solid figures are whittled directly from the post. Balkenhol builds subtle, quiet tension between object and space, always being straightforward in his means. There’s no trickery here.

In the fifth, a male figure holds another, smaller, virtually identical figure, as if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy. You half expect the bigger figure to make the smaller one talk--sort of the way a viewer discovers that he actively projects himself into Balkenhol’s sculpture. Michelangelo famously said that his job as a sculptor was just to chip away the excess from a block of stone to let out the figure already lurking inside, and Balkenhol does that with wood. The particular genius of his quirky work is to let you know that you have a lot to do with making that figure live.

Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through March 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Anniversary Exhibition Covers the Spectrum

Jan Baum Gallery is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a big show of mostly small paintings, sculptures, drawings and mixed-media works. The 80 examples are mostly recent, but the selection of artists ranges across the gallery’s history. From Expressionism to geometric abstraction, the diverse works don’t reveal a uniform gallery aesthetic (one possible exception: collage and assemblage are common). Two artists at different ends of the spectrum suggest the variety.

Alison Saar’s tin-covered totem, “Smokin’ Papa Chaud” (2001), a man piled high with buckets, tools, pots and pans, as well as her fiery portrait of a woman painted on an iron skillet, “Cherry” (2000), celebrate the bittersweet legacy of African American labor, which was critical to building the nation. Saar uses a powerful economy of means to coax maximum meaning out of ordinary materials.

By contrast, in 1977 Chris Burden took a post-Watergate page from Richard Nixon’s tattered life and performed a “Full Financial Disclosure” at the gallery. He showed collages composed of canceled personal checks from the prior year lined up sequentially on display boards. April 1976, the month shown here, includes (among other expenditures) $100 in rent for studio space, $15 in court fines for running a yellow light in Venice and $12.61 to Home Silk Shop for velvet to line the cases bearing relics from Burden’s notorious performances (for instance, the nails used to crucify him on top of his Volkswagen). An economic and political self-portrait, graced with 22 signatures by the artist, the fragment of Burden’s “Full Financial Disclosure” offers an unsentimental perspective on life during America’s bicentennial year.

Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 932-0170, through April 26. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Gorgeous Stoneware Is Abstract, Oddly Erotic

At Frank Lloyd Gallery, the Amsterdam potter Wouter Dam shows 15 recent ceramic sculptures glazed in monochrome sherbet colors or rich reds, purples, browns and black. The small, gorgeous stoneware vessels are abstract yet oddly erotic.

The thin-walled vessels are all ribbed, asymmetrical cylinders, open at both ends and lying on their sides. Dam fuses machine forms and organic shapes, like an industrial screw merged with a conch. The fusion smartly embodies the process involved in wheel-thrown ceramics.

The ribs emphasize volume, the open ends accentuate airiness. Sometimes their edges are sanded, creating razor-thin lines around the swollen vessels and enhancing their feeling of puffed-up inflation. The undulating cylinders and their voluptuous voids luxuriously recline, like uncanny Minimalist odalisques.

Frank Lloyd Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through April 13. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Is Video Projection Too Hip or Too Tired?

“Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,” a nearly unwatchable video projection by British artist Mark Leckey in the Project Room at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, is said in a museum handout to be a “visual essay on the history of dance culture in Britain” that “indulges a voyeuristic and vicarious hunger for the hip.” Actually it’s a tired assemblage of grainy (read sensitive) and out-of-focus (read authentic) clips of kids dancing at clubs, wandering the streets in packs and apparently high at raves, set to a mediocre pop soundtrack.

Ah, disaffected youth.

The one interesting feature of the vacant video is its source. Leckey is represented by the same New York gallery as the three high-profile artists featured in “Cavepainting,” the artist-organized show in the museum’s main gallery. It makes sense that those three would be affiliated with the same commercial outlet (birds of a feather flock together). But installing an apparent quid-pro-quo show in the Project Room makes you wonder whose vicarious hunger for the (supposedly) hip is actually being indulged.

Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 586-6488, through March 31. Closed Monday.