AROUND THE GALLERIES

March 9 is the 20th anniversary of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s death. Sept. 24 is the 19th anniversary of the start of the shameful obscenity trial in Cincinnati where a museum director faced prosecution for hosting a traveling exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s art. The sensational event was meant to intimidate, and in some respects its effects are still felt: Last week’s posturing by several U.S. congressmen against including arts jobs in the federal stimulus package could trace its roots to that vulgar battle in the culture war.

At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, “Robert Mapplethorpe: Black, White and Silver” assembles 21 exquisite images shot between 1983 and 1989. The show’s only disappointment is that just 12 are vintage prints; the remaining nine are posthumous prints, issued (and appropriately marked as such) by the estate. Acute precision is integral to this art’s photographic content, so it makes a difference.

A self-referential quality is also important to Mapplethorpe’s voluptuous work. The show’s title, “Black, White and Silver,” partly refers to the photographic medium; although he also worked in color, these are black-and-white silver prints.

Whether torsos, busts or full-length figures, all the photographs are nudes. The models in this selection are white men and women and black men, singly or variously paired, including four photographs of carved marble and cast-metal figurative sculptures. Carefully lighted to accentuate bodily musculature, tissue and veining -- whether human or not -- their luscious skin coincides with the lush photographic “skin” of the work’s beautifully printed surfaces.

They draw you in close, creating an intimate encounter. Sometimes they do it by placing skin against skin -- Robert Sherman’s shaved white head seen in profile adjacent to and matching Ken Moody’s shaved black head.

One of the most beautiful works juxtaposes two lithe bodies posed like dancers spooning, heads cropped and arms raised so they’re outside the frame. The figures’ genders are not immediately clear. Close inspection reveals both are men, but their masculinity and femininity blur.

“Ken and Lydia and Tyler” puts two men in mirror-image poses on either side of a woman, who faces front. The ensemble creates an erotic interlace of limbs, which cleverly forms the artist’s monogram, “M.”

Even “Mercury,” a picture of a carved white bust of the fleet-footed Roman messenger of the gods, resonates this way: The role of Mercury -- quicksilver -- is communication among powerful forces.

“Neck/Livingston” isolates the body in extreme close-up, showing the area between the model’s sternum and chin. It takes a moment to recognize what this subtly lighted, gently undulating, nearly abstract surface is. When you do, its sensual focus on a larynx suddenly speaks: An Adam’s apple -- the forbidden fruit -- takes shape as a homoerotic pun.

Punning is pivotal to Mapplethorpe’s aesthetic. His formal technique derived from the classic work of Paul Strand, Imogen Cunningham and, perhaps most important, Edward Weston. (Several pictures of Lydia Cheng, a favorite Mapplethorpe model, are clear references to Weston’s cropped nudes.) Their work peeled away the literary and artistic clutter that attached to early 20th century camera work, instead embracing its distinctive qualities in their own right. It came to be known as straight photography.

As a gay man, Mapplethorpe used straight photography to empower precisely those people the straight power structure customarily victimized -- blacks, women, homosexuals -- as well as to celebrate the human sexual liberty it routinely proscribed. That effrontery is what went on trial in Cincinnati nearly 20 years ago. The case was resolved in the director’s favor, but a final verdict on the larger subject isn’t yet in.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 933-9911, through March 28. Closed Sunday and Monday. www .marcselwynfineart.com

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Holler’s new spin on mushrooms

Carsten Holler makes sculptures and installations designed to destabilize and disorient. The Belgian-born, Stockholm-based Holler makes his solo debut in Los Angeles with an uneven show that, at its best, nudges a level of wonder.

An acid-green baby deer quietly curled up in a corner at Gagosian Gallery certainly does that. Glinting brown eyes and hooves of actual horn yield a level of realism that collides with the outrageously phony color, which seems magical or irradiated, depending on your frame of mind. This gentle creature is either a fairy-tale miracle or nature in its final, poisoned death rattle.

The back room holds a trio of aluminum suitcases opened on the floor beneath high-powered hanging floodlights, as if grow lamps have been trained on a businessman’s baggage. Step closer, and solar panels within the suitcases are providing electrical power for a couple dozen amanita mushrooms -- the white-spotted, deep-red toadstools whose psychoactive ingredients can, depending on the circumstance, cause hallucinations or death.

Dotted with sparkly crystals, the mushrooms are gaily spinning. Holler’s ensemble is like something from James Bond by way of Disney, with a bit of the Brothers Grimm thrown in for good measure. Tight rationality and wild release are opposed as optimal states of existence.

Upstairs, a suite of large photographic collages mounted on aluminum shows a willowy young nude with cascades of strawberry blond hair engaging with reindeer. The Botticellian Venus offers them mushrooms, while the photographic color-separations on both girl and beast go out of whack, surrounding them with rainbow hues. Produced like a frivolous fashion spread, the serious pictures thrive on ambiguous impulses.

The weak link in the show is a pair of 7-foot acrylic spheres, a red one suspended and a black one resting on the floor. Double layers of acrylic are pierced with holes, and clear- or frosted-glass lightbulbs inside the spheres flash at seemingly random intervals. You get the feeling they’re supposed to be hypnotic, knocking you off your routine. Instead, they just look overproduced.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Saturday. www.gagosian.com

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Spanning the witty and the coy

An elegant pencil drawing by Romanian artist Ciprian Muresan shows a tall fellow with an unusually long torso. His face is scrunched, as if exhaling in sorrow. Way down at the drawing’s bottom, his hands are carefully slicing an onion.

An art of manufactured tears is the curious undercurrent of the group show “The Punishment of Lust and Luxury,” which presents seven drawings and three videos (one unavailable for viewing when I visited) at Mihai Nicodim Gallery. Some works are witty, like Adrian Ghenie’s bleary pencil rendering of a smeared face. “Pie Fight Study” pays tribute to a futile yet heartfelt retort.

Others are coy, like Martin Skauen’s “Scent of a Woman (Theresa).” Crowning her sweet and apprehensive head, the fearsome snakes of Medusa have been replaced with rodents -- the reptiles’ lunch.

The most compelling work is a short video, “The Lake Arches,” by French artist Cyprien Gaillard. At 1 1/2 minutes, the action happens fast.

A young man in swimming trunks stands at lake’s edge. A second young man runs by, and the two dive headlong into the water. Instantly they pop up, wounded from having hit bottom.

In the background of what is now clearly not a lake but a shallow reflecting pool, an ostentatious apartment building -- presumably, the titular Lake Arches -- looms into view. The boy with the scraped, bloody, perhaps broken nose buries his face in a bright blue towel.

When the loop repeats, you want to avert your eyes too. As an image of playful abandon yielding sudden, painful awareness, all beneath a looming architectural atrocity, the video assumes potent metaphorical punch.

Mihai Nicodim Gallery, 944 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 621-2786, through Feb. 28. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.nicodimgallery.com

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Aspirations vs. mundane realities

A keen sense of sweet absurdity marks Justin Hansch’s solo debut at Circus Gallery. It hits just the right note.

A pinata made in the likeness of painter Richard Jackson and filled with paint was smashed open, spewing color in swirling puddles on the floor and across a painting that shows the very room you’re standing in, hanging on a nearby wall. Upstairs, 10 small abstract canvases layering gestural shapes over atmospheric color are installed at equal intervals around the room -- even though that rigorous logic means one canvas half-covers a window. Both installations pit painting’s grand aspirations against mundane realities.

The show’s centerpiece is a big, free-standing wall painted ecclesiastical purple, on which 21 small, rudimentary paintings are hung. These depict everything from a surfer’s perfect wave to a gigantic dog, man’s best friend, in crude yet earnest renderings.

Hansch represents humble desires in a manner at once grandiose and goofy. Based on a visualization board, where pictures of one’s personal dreams and prayers are hung for guided inspiration, the work knowingly fuses self-help culture with artistic practice, neatly leavening both.

Circus Gallery, 7065 Lexington Ave., Hollywood, (323) 962-8506, through Saturday. www .circus-gallery.com

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christopher.knight @latimes.com