AROUND THE GALLERIES

In theory, pairing a roomful of works by Wallace Berman (1926-76) with a roomful of pieces by Richard Prince makes sense. Both bodies of work focus on women, often naked, posing provocatively or having sex. Both feature collages. And both turn away from the niceties of fine art for the grittiness of mass-produced imagery.

But in person, “She: Wallace Berman and Richard Prince” fizzles. Few sparks fly between Berman’s 38 hauntingly intimate pictures from the 1960s and 1970s and Prince’s 16 coldhearted representations, all but two from 2007-08. Organized by independent curator Kristine McKenna for the Michael Kohn Gallery, the show falls into halves; neither has much to do with the other, except superficially.

The profound differences between Berman’s earnest bohemianism and Prince’s cynical voyeurism are ignored in favor of a theme -- naked babes! -- that is too trite to deliver significant insights.

Part of the problem is that nudity isn’t what it used to be. The Internet, the porn industry and the sexual revolution are some of the social changes that separate Berman’s era from the present.

Plus, the art world as we know it did not exist when Berman made his fantastic, handcrafted Pop works in Topanga Canyon, where he lived like a DIY outsider and fashioned his own brand of spiritual poetry. In contrast, Prince is an insider, a big player in the international art business. His huge pieces sell briskly at auctions and are regularly featured in major museum surveys and international biennials, to which he travels by private jet.

His works in the first gallery make you wonder what all the fuss is about. Three are blown-up photos from girlie magazines. The two in color are framed and hung on a wall. The third, in black and white, has been enlarged to huge dimensions, transferred to vinyl and affixed to a 1986 El Camino, as if advertising an adolescent fantasy. There’s also a mailbox that Prince has covered with black-and-white reproductions from 1970s porn magazines.

Most of his pieces are page-size collages made from the covers of 60-cent Harlequin Romances and images clipped from porn magazines. Nearly all transform a PG-rated book cover into an X-rated scene. Such pictures might drive middle school boys wild, but some might find them to be boring, too artsy and mean-spirited to be turn-ons. In any case, none inspires second looks or draws you into a world you’d like to visit for long. At best, they are hollow wisecracks for collectors who want to be cool.

In contrast, Berman’s works are cool. They are also poignant, evocative and mysterious, in tune with something bigger, deeper and more moving than mass-produced porn. Cosmic wonder and everyday ordinariness intermingle promiscuously in Berman’s potent pictures. All draw you into a world dense with significance and the possibility of transcendence.

Rather than taking pictures of pictures found in magazines, like Prince, Berman often took pictures of women he knew and loved, including Jay DeFeo, Shirley Berman and Beverly Walsh. The intimacy in his silver prints is palpable. He sometimes mailed his cut-and-paste images to friends, with personal messages meant just for them. Their sweetness still resonates.

Berman also reproduced pictures he found in magazines, using an early Verifax copier to create grids of images. He often used the image of a hand holding a transistor radio as a “frame” for these pictures, suggesting that they were ineffable messages drifting through the atmosphere, like invisible signals from the beyond.

There’s nothing naive or outdated about Berman’s art. It is so much more sophisticated than Prince’s that it doesn’t make sense to juxtapose them.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 658-8088, through March 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .kohngallery.com.

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Humans animals, so badly behaved

Rebekah Bogard’s ceramic sculptures belong to the school of curdled cutesiness. At the Sam Lee Gallery, a menagerie of sleek cartoon beasts runs amok, its animals’ stylized bodies and generic cuddliness giving way to a mean streak that’s anything but sweet.

On first glance, Bogard has crafted a cotton candy wonderland. Its flora consists of lollipop trees (some 6 feet tall), bulbous bushes and starfish flowers, which are bigger than bowling balls. Its fauna includes a flock of oversize hummingbirds and a dozen pet-size creatures that appear to be the crossed offspring of bunnies and squirrels, with a smattering of fawn, piglet and raccoon mixed into their discombobulated DNA.

Everything is pink, from bright bubble gum to rosy pastel, except for some of the mutant critters’ eyes, which are bloodshot, and other anatomical features, which are swollen.

Such creepy details poison the sugarcoated fantasy of Bogard’s impeccably fabricated and beautifully glazed animals. Suddenly, the segmented trees look phallic, less like innocent cartoons and more like supersized sex toys.

The unsavoriness of it all is hammered home when you notice that many of the beasties in the Nevada-based artist’s L.A. solo debut are behaving badly -- less like real animals in nature, where sex and death are just part of life, and more like humans, who often complicate such purely animal activities by layering all sorts of ill-begotten meanings upon them.

Emotional cruelty and psychological complexity take pointed shape in Bogard’s provocative installation. Titled “Flesh and Bone,” it paints a sensitive and vicious picture of the domesticated animal known as man.

Sam Lee Gallery, 990 N. Hill St., No. 190, L.A., (323) 227-0275, through March 14. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays. www.samleegallery.com.

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Permanent yet ever-shifting

When photography was invented, painting went into convulsions, creating more styles more swiftly than ever before. Now that the Digital Age is upon us, sculpture is undergoing similar shifts: All sorts of artists are making all sorts of works that invite viewers to contemplate the relationship between three-dimensional reality and its virtual surrogate.

At the David Kordansky Gallery, Patrick Hill’s four sculptures dance back and forth between the two-dimensional world of electronically transmitted pictures and the 3-D reality of clunky substances.

Each of the two biggest is a diptych of sorts. Both begin with a 9-foot-long beam that Hill has been saturated with black dye and laid flat on the floor. Each of the beams serves as a pedestal for an approximately 6-foot-square sheet of tinted glass, which stands upright and at an angle from the business end of each sculpture: two huge lumps of painted concrete in “Screen” and a large lump of concrete that wraps around a vertical beam in “Biter (Chain of Love).”

Think of the two works as crude viewing instruments from the early days of optics, only too unwieldy to effectively illustrate anything specific or useful. To walk around each is to give yourself over to a series of rich visual experiences.

Sometimes the glass functions as a window, turning the concrete into a shadowy image. At others it’s a reflective backdrop, accentuating the tactility of the concrete. If Robert Smithson and Larry Bell had collaborated, the results might resemble these pieces.

Hill’s three small paintings fall flat. Even though they are made of thickly slathered concrete, they lack the shape-shifting drama of his larger works.

The best of these big works is “Horizontal (Erotic City).” Its jaunty combination of marble, metal and concrete, alongside glass, wood and canvas, as well as paint, stain and dye, replace the this-or-that ambiguity of his diptychs with the whiplash visual shifts of a triptych in triplicate. It’s too complex to sum up and a pleasure to encounter in the flesh.

David Kordansky Gallery, 3143 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 558-3030, through March 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.davidkordansky gallery.com

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Catch the eye, then the brain

It’s difficult to know what you’re looking at when you stand in front of Rebecca Morales’ new paintings, and that’s one of the best things about them.

At the Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Morales’ mixed-media works on irregularly shaped swatches of specially prepared calfskin make a great first impression. Then they get better. And better.

Their colors pop, especially in three big diptychs, each of which is about 6 feet tall or long. Blazing reds, supersaturated blues, smoldering oranges and tangy greens intermingle with delicate pastels in all sorts of silvery shades.

Morales draws like an architect, with laser-sharp lines that describe things so precisely you instantly think her abstract pictures depict real things in the real world. At the same time, Morales’ fantastically crafted abstractions get your imagination going in so many directions that you start to wonder why they’re neither maddening nor frustrating but strangely serene in their own offbeat, exquisitely sensitive way.

The rugged vellum links them to such ancient archaeological treasures as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The forms Morales paints and draws recall magnified images of microorganisms, viruses and cellular structures with their own queasy beauty. Their textures, however, have less to do with medical textbooks or botanical manuals than arts-and-crafts handbooks, especially those instructing hobbyists how to crochet, knit and work with silky lengths of thread and soft folds of fabric.

There’s also an odd, photographic quality to Morales’ mesmerizing works, which combine watercolor, gouache, pastel and ink in ways that make light look liquid, sensuous, stirring. Think mid-19th century daguerreotypes, which seem to capture the souls of sitters via science and its newfangled technologies.

All of Morales’ deeply intriguing pieces play so fast and loose with such a wide range of associations that you’d think they’d come off as misbegotten melanges: postmodern conglomerations of a little of this and a little of that, adding up to a whole lot less than the sum of their parts.

But they don’t.

You have to see them to believe them, even if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 954-8425, through March 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .danielweinberggallery.com.