Palettes blend, themes contrast

Given the great confusion of purpose that often seems to be afflicting contemporary art -- where anything goes, for better or worse -- one has ever more reason to appreciate an artist such as David McDonald, whose work remains solidly rooted in a few profound fundamentals: color, texture, scale and the mysterious alchemy of material and form.

It’s not work that advertises itself or goes out of its way to get your attention. Of the roughly two dozen sculptures in his show at the Jail Gallery, most are about the size of a fire hydrant and all sit directly on the floor. The materials are humble -- wood, cement, mortar and paint, primarily -- and the shapes basic.

The cube has been a prominent McDonald motif in recent years. It appears here in “NON,” a piece consisting of stacked gray and yellow box-like forms, and the particularly lovely “Nove Alberi,” a free-standing wall, about the size of a car door, made from slender wood blocks of fluctuating colors.

In the show’s remaining works, McDonald shifts into an exploration of the cylinder: cast-cement forms of various heights and diameters, all vertical, loosely clustered in one corner of the gallery. If this all sounds rather dry on paper -- like an exercise in geometry, or just so much recycled Minimalism -- what largely keeps it from being so is the extraordinarily resonant nature of the arrangements and surfaces.

For all its structure and the heft of its materials, the work has an organic tone and an improvisational, even spontaneous spirit. The cement is studded with pebbles, air bubbles and pockmarks. The pigments -- mostly grays and blacks, with touches of turquoise and ocher -- are loosely, even (it seems) haphazardly applied. They drip and splatter; in places they seem worn or peeled away. Each slip inscribes an element of character.

Though McDonald is clearly indebted to Western Minimalism, his more striking affinity is with ancient architecture and the more rustic strains of Japanese pottery.

The title of the show is “Minor Monuments,” which encapsulates both the humility and the dignity of these absorbing objects.

The show shares the space with two others, very different in theme and personality but highly complementary, thanks in part to their mutually sympathetic palettes.

Annie Wharton’s “Pungent Glimmer” involves about a dozen lively, mid-size paintings on Mylar, all basically abstract and rendered primarily in shades of pink and brown, which are interspersed to surprisingly handsome effect among McDonald’s more austere sculptures.

Among the “interests and influences” Wharton lists in her statement on the work, she includes “fairies, muscle cars, California wasteland, amoebas, punk rock and electronic music, outer space, and the excess promulgated by Hollywood” -- which gives you a sense of the imaginative range. The works themselves, however, are far more cohesive, even elegant, than that list would suggest: agile swirls of curling pigment floating in clean fields of white, a fruitful balance of the concerted and the playful.

“Hubris Cream,” Jason David’s droll gem of a show in the gallery’s project space, consists of nine small canvases featuring the heads of classical figures (presumably drawn from ancient sculpture), each smothered in thick, sticky white pigment, as if the recipient of a pie in the face. The effect is of a one-liner, but a good one, undermining a range of philosophical questions by pairing two of the foremost figures in Western thought: the classical thinker and the slapstick comedian.

Jail Gallery, 965 N. Vignes St., 5A, Los Angeles, (213) 621-9567, through Jan. 3. Closed Sundays through Thursdays. www.thejailgallery.com

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Reused items add an ideal touch

Maeghan Reid’s solo debut at Chung King Project -- one of the strongest in recent memory -- revolves around the figure of the drifter, the gypsy, the nomad or the outsider. Solitary silhouettes roam her collages with walking sticks in hand and bags slung over their shoulders. Small groups gather in makeshift camps; buildings loom in vast isolation, on the peaks of hills or surrounded by plains. There is a prevailing sense of both alienation and freedom, exclusion and liberation.

This spirit is less palpable in the imagery, however, than in the materials themselves, which look as though they could have been gathered by the very characters Reid is assembling.

Old photographs, discarded bits of linoleum and cardboard, toothpicks, strips of satin, velvet, corduroy and upholstery -- all are fragments drawn from the world at large, once the fabric of another picture, another story. Every surface exudes a sense of history.

Collage is a widely practiced and seldom dazzling genre, but Reid approaches it with a rare degree of concentration and sensitivity, assembling and manipulating her materials with the same care that she shows in choosing them. The works range from letter- to poster-sized, and Reid is equally adept at either end of the scale. The smaller compositions are tight, intimate and jewel-like; the larger, assuredly expansive and monumental. No inch of surface is squandered or overlooked.

The fastidiousness with which Reid treats these once discarded materials invests them with a kind of opulence that seems an extension of her reverence for her subjects. Whether by choice or necessity, her vagabonds have set about living life by their own systems of value.

Chung King Project, 945 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 625-1802, through Dec. 20. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.chungkingproject.com

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A distinctive, stubborn vision

Fashion photographer Lillian Bassman, protegee of Harper’s Bazaar designer Alexey Brodovitch and friend to Richard Avedon, rose to prominence in the 1940s and ‘50s but drifted out of the business, threw out her negatives and fell into relative obscurity for decades -- until Helen Frankenthaler, who happened to be renting her onetime studio, came across a cache of lost negatives in 1991.

A monograph followed, a flush of prestigious assignments and a handful of exhibitions, launching her career once more at about age 80.

A substantial survey at the Peter Fetterman Gallery reveals Bassman, now 91, to be an artist of singular if rather obstinate vision.

Indeed, her style was so distinct -- black-and-white, highly contrasted, fantastically romantic -- that it’s difficult to imagine how she could have weathered the shift into the ocher-tinted haze of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Her women are tall, impossibly slender, and suggestive less of women than of some exceedingly elegant breed of animal.

Their gowns are, for the most part, enormous -- she was a photographer ideally suited to couture -- and they carry the garments with an agile grandeur rarely seen in the modern era or probably in any other.

These are marvelously glamorous pictures. More interesting, however, is the fact that many of them are also quite strange, veering from the concerns of commercial fashion into some other aesthetic territory entirely.

Bassman was fascinated with contrast and not afraid to take it to extremes, ramping it up at times to such a degree as to turn her forms into blocks of deep black and glaring white. She manipulated her photographs extensively in the darkroom, blurring, burning and bleaching without apparent trepidation, no more limited by the traditions of the print than she was by the reality of the female body, bending both to meet the vision of her mind’s eye.

Peter Fetterman Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave, A7, Santa Monica, (310) 453-6463, through Jan. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.peterfetterman.com

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Painter shows poetic sensitivity

The paintings in Hungarian artist Peter Sudar’s U.S. solo debut at the Mihai Nicodim Gallery are modest in scale, somber in palette and so unassuming as to risk a quick dismissal by the hurried or impatient viewer. Linger even a moment, however, and they absorb you entirely.

There are eight paintings in the show; all are portraits, most self-portraits, with the artist arrayed in various guises. Sudar’s technique evokes that of such 19th century realists as Courbet, Eakins and Whistler. The visual tone is dim and shadowy, with loose, moody brush strokes belied by a startling precision of expression and gesture.

The historical quality is clearly conscious, and Sudar toys with its implications. Some of the paintings contain elements suggestive of another era: a military uniform; a tin cup and flannel cap; a depiction of the artist’s father in a pose reminiscent of a famous photograph of Stalin. Others add a contemporary twist: a blue sports helmet, the slender white stripes of an Adidas jacket.

The real pleasure, however, is a quality that transcends the specifics of any particular era: the poetic sensitivity of the painting itself.

Mihai Nicodim Gallery, 944 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, (213) 621-2786, through Dec. 30. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.

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