The ordinary becomes building blocks of life

Solidity is something we assume is essential to sculpture, but New York artist Tara Donovan makes sculptures that tease out a hidden fluidity inherent in matter at an invisible, molecular level. Quiet, almost subliminal tension is at the core of her work.

At Ace Gallery, her large and compelling exhibition of sculpture from the last four years is an exercise in the myriad possibilities for shape shifting. The show, which features 13 large-scale works and numerous drawings, prints and light boxes, fills the cavernous space at Ace. It’s uneven, but when it’s good it’s very good indeed.

Like Tom Friedman, but to very different ends, Donovan begins with utilitarian household objects: buttons, Styrofoam cups, toothpicks, paper plates, electrical wire, fishing wire, Scotch tape, pencils, straight pins, etc. Employing ordinary things readily at hand increases the work’s unsettling charm. Each sculpture is composed from a single set of objects, as if plastic cups or toothpicks each had one essential quality.

Three identical cubes -- each one 40 inches to a side and standing on the floor -- exude entirely different qualities. One is made from tens of thousands of rounded wooden toothpicks (it was shown by itself at Ace a few years ago), another from tens of thousands of silvery straight pins and a third from perhaps 200 sheets of tempered safety glass that have been shattered and stacked.

No artificial adhesives of any kind hold these cubes together -- just the invisible natural forces of gravity and friction. Stray toothpicks, pins and bits of glass are scattered around the floor, attesting to the cubes’ precarious integrity. A low-level energy flows through these brittle, prickly pieces, which seem poised to disintegrate.

The old Minimalist idea of art as a specific object, devoid of metaphors for subjective human experience, gets an unexpected twist: Is the cube the object here, or are the toothpicks, pins and glass? Donovan’s cubes, like Donald Judd’s famous precedents, eliminate composition and focus on the singular object. But her work is mysterious, mixing randomness, accident, potential energy, transformation and a gee-whiz sense of playfulness that Judd would never countenance.

Elsewhere, thousands of plastic drinking straws emerge from a wall to create a soft, white, undulating fog-bank that seems to move as the light shifts when you walk in front of it. Clouds loom overhead in another room as light filters through plastic cups attached in billowing forms suspended from the ceiling. And the gray concrete floor appears to liquefy into silvery ripples, formed by layered concentric rings of electrical wire that fill a room 20 feet by 22 feet.

The most exotic material, used for perhaps the most powerful piece in this show, is tar paper. Donovan has stacked hundreds of sheets of carefully torn black tar paper in an enormous rectangle, more than 35 feet long, 15 feet wide and 4 1/2 feet high.

The top surface of this massive, plinth-like slab undulates like the surface of an angry, churning sea, or a topographical map charting a charred and devastated landscape. The sculpture seems to suck the light out of the room, exuding a density and weight that undoes the material associations of shelter and comfort that come with humble roofing paper. This specific object is a welter of contradictions -- at once elegant and crude, industrial and homemade, poetic and banal, fluid and inert.

At the opposite end of Donovan’s spectrum are several remarkable drawings made with soap bubbles on foam-core board. Tinting the soapy water with blue ink or dye, she scattered foam across the foam-core. As the bubbles burst, they left pale blue traces of both their form and their explosion. The linear webs of color recall cloud chambers.

Sometimes the work feels gimmicky, flat or even pointless, as in stalagmites composed from stacks of purple and white buttons glued together, or white stickers on Mylar sheets layered in light boxes to suggest kaleidoscopic patterns extending into infinity. They don’t repay attention with wonder, seeming instead like earnest efforts to fill the gallery’s enormous spaces.

At her best, however, Donovan is a veritable Rumpelstiltskin, spinning straw into gold. The cubes, the tar paper slab, the bubble drawings and several others make for one the most rewarding shows this season.

Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 935-4411, through May 31. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Slippery by design

Bart Exposito is among the more accomplished of the Neo-Hard-Edge painters who have emerged in recent years. (Speaking of which, the time is ripe for a serious, analytical group show that would distinguish this work from superficial 1980s Neo-Geo.) Five new paintings in acrylic and marker on canvas and four new drawings at Black Dragon Society demonstrate his continuing verve.

Interlaces of precise bands of color, frequently outlined in black or white, initially look like rejects from a branding project for an unidentified corporate client. It’s the “reject” part that holds your interest: These sleek, flat, punchy graphic images are too visually slippery to conform to the narrow demands of product identification.

Exposito has waded into an increasingly crowded territory marked by the conflation of postwar art and industrial design. Turning the conventional tables, he has used the latter to energize the former. The drawings show how he plots his paintings’ courses, but it’s the paintings themselves that are arresting.

The patterns are as suggestive of Pacific Northwest Indian art as they are of hip graphic design, which suggests something about our blindness to contemporary social rituals. Look closely, and the precision of the linear interlaces reveals itself to be anything but mechanical: Exposito’s interlaces are drawn freehand. For all their pre-planned complexity they retain a freewheeling sense of spontaneity.

They seem to expand into illusionist space, defying the flat application of color, like spatial diagrams turning on a computer screen. Perhaps this accounts for the undeniable sensation of movement in his work. Virtual abstraction is turning out to be a headier concept than virtual reality.

Black Dragon Society, 961 Chung King Road., Chinatown, (213) 620-0030, through Feb. 26. Closed Sun. through Wed.

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A debate put to rest

The otherwise remarkable recent museum exhibition of quilts created by a group of women who live in the isolated African American hamlet of Gee’s Bend, Ala., was seriously marred by unwitting condescension. The quilts were hung on the wall, and many art critics promptly gushed that they were great because they looked liked abstract paintings.

But who knows? Maybe abstract paintings, first made by establishment white men, are great because they look like quilts made by disenfranchised black women.

At Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Bay Area artist Anna Von Mertens fixes the false hierarchy of such irrelevant comparisons by emphasizing her quilts’ utilitarian substance as sculptural objects. Each of five quilts -- one two-part work and three single panels -- are displayed on low white platforms, which act as the Minimalist equivalent of beds. Quilts, like many textiles, spring to life when their bodily associations are manifest.

The patterns Von Mertens stitches in her quilts show fields of energy -- a nuclear explosion, a radiating mandala, prism-like rays of color and clusters of arrows that a gallery handout says refer to ocean currents but that also make reference to the directional process of stitching itself. Death, sex, spirit and cycles of life are subtly entwined in Von Mertens’ lovely work. All four are greatly enhanced by her savvy decision to lay them out on beds.

Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 837-1073, through Feb. 26. Closed Sun. and Mon.

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Drawn in by an emerging artist

Mark Grotjahn, whose rich abstract paintings stand out from the pack in Pittsburgh’s current Carnegie International, is showing a group of recent large-scale drawings in the suitably chapel-like Projects Gallery at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Five employ his so-called “butterfly” motif of radiating fans of color drawn in pencil against a white ground; the two newest, which represent a new direction, are dubbed “black flowers” for their fluid, allover patterns drawn in black graphite. All seven are exquisite.

What’s most appealing about Grotjahn’s work is the sheer acuity of its contemplative substance. His drawings, like his paintings, effortlessly pull you into their networks of fabrication.

The splayed patterns of random color, reminiscent of light turning into a rainbow after passing through a prism, seem to emanate from a mysterious place deep within the sheet of paper. The nested undulations of black graphite are repetitive, as if ritualistically applied, and they absorb light into the innards of the page.

In neither case, however, is Grotjahn suggesting some enigmatic “inner world,” locked away in art and unavailable to mere mortals. Instead, keenness of physical perception is exalted. Visually unique, Grotjahn creates intuitive systems reminiscent of those that animated the extraordinary work of Alfred Jensen (1903-1981). He is rapidly emerging as a major talent.

UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (310) 443-7000, through April 17. Closed Monday.