Price’s resplendent sculptures pack a punch

Four years ago, Ken Price was making the best work of his career. This year, he’s still at it.

Ten fabulous new sculptures at L.A. Louver Gallery show the 70-year-old artist to be among the most important sculptors of his generation and, more likely than not, at least two subsequent generations.

Techniques and themes that appeared in earlier works are refined and expanded in the new pieces. All were made in 2004. Each commands far more space than its size suggests. Only two, “Gongs” and “Bloato,” stand two feet tall. “Stacked,” “Steeps” and “Down” would have to lie about their height to claim they were 12 inches high.

Even so, Price is not a miniaturist. His rock-solid sculptures never shrink the vast dimensions of the real world or some fantasy version of it. On the contrary, they inhabit the same space -- and the same mental plane -- occupied by visitors.

Although all of Price’s ceramic sculptures are visually resplendent, their bulbous forms gorgeously covered with no less than 75 coats of paint in a stunning techno-autumnal palette, their initial impact is bodily. You feel them in your gut. Only then does your perceptual machinery try to make sense of them.

Price complicates the game of mind and body cat-and-mouse by making works that also seem to be pulled in many directions at once. Unlike his sculptures from the past decade, the new ones do not appear to be subject to single organizing principles or animated by unified consciousness, sense of purpose or will. Instead, many seem to be made up of several independent organisms, each with a mind of its own.

“The Heap” takes this multi-part, multidirectional complexity to extremes. From every angle, it appears to be half a dozen or more separate blobs of animate protoplasm that slither all over one another in a sort of organic orgy or group grope among cellular structures. It’s hard to tell whether the cluster sticks together for protection or pleasure.

“Wide Load,” “McLean” and “Down” also resemble fantastic, lumbering sea creatures. These meaty pieces have no proper fronts or backs; they require you to circle them repeatedly. From various positions, they look like completely different objects.

As a group, they take a step away from the exuberant cartoon goofiness of Price’s earlier works to evoke ancient Mesopotamian talismans rubbed smooth by devotees and Mayan monuments weathered by centuries of exposure. Their droopy softness has nothing to do with deflation or abjection. Instead, seasoned wisdom makes them the most generous and forgiving art Price has made.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., (310) 822-4955, through Feb. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Beetles in midst of an oddly fab forum

Beetles that eat carrion, clothing and furniture star in Ryan Taber and Cheyenne Weaver’s “In Search of a Myopic’s Leitmotif.” Like movie stars, Dermestid museorum (Linnaeus) beetles keep a low profile. Visitors to the show at Machine Project, an artist-run, weekends-only gallery in Silver Lake, must look closely and sometimes wait to see the insects in action. In the meantime, Taber and Weaver provide plenty to look at -- and more to ponder -- in their intelligently amusing piece of storefront theater.

Just inside the front door lies a big hollow tree trunk made of Styrofoam, plaster and wood. Its base faces the shop window, forming a circular, root-framed opening that attracts the eyes of passersby as effectively as any big-budget window display. Peering into the 14-foot-long trunk is like looking into the wrong end of a telescope: Distance expands exponentially and objects at arm’s length appear to be far off.

Eight proscenium arches installed in the tree amplify this effect. Behind the last one lies a spotlighted diorama of a vast landscape, its craggy peaks and sandy expanses compressing environments ordinarily separated by great distances into a space no bigger than a small easel painting.

Five pencil drawings hung on the walls around the tree depict insects whose limbs, armor and mandibles have been replaced with modern items that serve similar functions, including maritime navigational tools, art nouveau lamps and shipping trunks. Strains of Richard Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” play intermittently over hidden speakers, adding to the odd drama.

The worlds-within-worlds structure of the installation takes an even more curious turn when you look through a screen-covered skylight cut in the tree bark above the diorama and see the beetles squirming in their elaborately decorated cage. You don’t need a hyperactive imagination to begin spinning stories that might make sense of the show’s unlikely components: real bugs on a small stage in a fake tree in a gallery displaying old-fashioned drawings of oversized, prosthetically enhanced bugs.

Two pages of single-spaced exhibition notes provide no solace for visitors who like their art simple and distinct from life’s untidiness. They identify the tree’s bark as Cinchona, a source of the anti-malarial quinine, which played a large part in making colonialism possible. The beetles, used by taxidermists and natural history museums to strip bones, have been known to escape their containers and devour entire collections. Juxtaposed, the stories of conquering Europeans and insatiable insects speak volumes about creation and destruction, as well as the limits of control and the reality of unintended consequences.

The tale expands to include early germ warfare, romantic opera, budding nationalism, Enlightenment taxonomy and fever dreams. The climax of the opera and the symptoms of malaria follow similar rhythms. Visually the words “aria” and “malaria” also echo one another.

Despite the exhibition’s rich metaphorical possibilities and its embrace of far-reaching (or farfetched) parables, Taber and Weaver never let things spin out of control. Their work is based in the conviction that truth is stranger than fiction and more fascinating than art, if only our imaginations are able to keep up with its dizzying twists and turns.

Machine Project, 1200-D North Alvarado St., (213) 483-8761, through Feb. 20. Saturday and Sunday only. Artists lecture, 3 p.m. Feb. 20.

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New vistas in landscape painting

The natural landscape isn’t what it used to be. Neither is landscape painting. “Groundwork,” the aptly titled inaugural exhibition at D.E.N. Contemporary Art, consists of mixed-media images by eight artists whose heads are filled with digital info yet whose hearts are drawn to the pleasures of plein-air painting.

Isabel Manalo and Tim Forcum abstract shapes from nature. Their canvases suggest a world that has been digitally transmitted, its components all the more romantic for being elusive.

Michael Napper and Fran Siegel make the most atmospheric works. Using oil, pencil and raw pigment, Napper coaxes sensuous vistas out of thin air. Siegel encases fragments of Mylar, monofilament and silver beads in shallow Plexiglas boxes mounted on the wall. Using a mixture of mica, wax and acrylic, she paints translucent swirls on the boxes’ interiors and exteriors, creating self-contained reliefs that recycle sunlight by reflecting it every which way.

Map-making and field research are evoked by the remaining works. Noriko Ambe’s carefully cut and stacked sheets of translucent paper neatly transform contour maps into 3-D reliefs. Brandon Morse’s computer-generated video, projected on the floor and walls of a darkened back room, flattens clouds and cellular structures into two-dimensional grids of distinct pixels.

Earthy textures fill Leyla Cardenas’ fragile pieces. Like a detective dusting for fingerprints, she paints thin coats of acrylic resin on ordinary surfaces. When the quick-drying medium forms a skin, she peels it off, mounts it on pins and arranges the fragments in tasteful compositions on the gallery wall and floor.

Shona Macdonald’s modest gouaches depict snowflakes, trees and tiny horizon-lines that crisscross a page like cracks in a window. These lovely studies nudge Realism into the background as they bring abstract patterns and decorative flourishes to the forefront.

“Groundwork” is a sensible show that does what it says and even more.

D.E.N. Contemporary Art, 6023 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 559-3023, through Feb. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A show in which smaller is better

Lia Halloran’s solo debut at Sandroni Rey Gallery features five big paintings of pretty women dressed as astronauts. Five smaller abstractions round out the exhibition. They show more promise than the young painter’s figurative pictures, which would fare far better if they were modestly scaled watercolors.

When Halloran allows the media she uses in her small works -- ink on vellum, pencil on paper and pigment on panel -- to do their own thing, the abstractions that result are fresh and expansive, both intimate and mysterious. When she uses oil on canvas to execute preconceived compositions, however, the sofa-sized results have the presence of second-rate illustrations.

Part of the problem is that it’s exponentially more difficult to make every square inch of an 8-by-6-foot canvas matter than it is to make every bit of a body-scaled painting visually captivating. And Halloran’s subject matter -- solitary babes in space -- is more elaborately and substantially fleshed out in any number of Japanese comic books and animated films.

Paint, in all its wet, fleshy physicality, must play a greater role if her works are to stand apart from their sources and sustain attention.

Sandroni Rey Gallery, 2762 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 280-0111, through Feb. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.