Metaphoric Richness in Steel-Glass Works

There is humor in Bella Feldman’s work, and there is wisdom. In 15 new sculptures at Jan Baum Gallery, the Bay Area sculptor teams steel and glass with tremendous formal integrity and broad expressive range.

In one work, she conjures an “Ark” as ancient relic, while nearby she envisions the “Perfect Purse”--casual, ample, familiar. In most of the sculptures, clear glass vessels are braced by steel armatures and suspended from the wall by industrial-strength hooks.

Feldman exploits the different characters of her materials to exquisite effect, playing the sturdy, aggressive metal against the yielding glass--dense opacity against translucent membrane. In “Venus II,” she captures the glass in an intermediate state, between solid and liquid. The glass vessel has settled into an angular steel hammock of sorts, oozing slightly between the bars like extra flesh between the slats of a chair, and assuming the ripe, abundant shape of an ancient fertility figure.

Feldman’s work over the last three decades has ventured over extensive thematic terrain, from creation to mutation and destruction, from biological substructures to architectural superstructures. These new works straddle the organic and mechanistic, and with the exception of the larger, more symbolically overwrought floor pieces, they do so with an ease and temperate beauty.

They embody conditions--”Turvy,” for one, puts an attractive spin on disequilibrium--and characters, such as the bumbling boyishness of “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.” Even love, loss and entrapment might be found here, in Feldman’s latest, elegant installments in the ongoing saga of human experience.

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Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (323) 932-0170, through June 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.