Forms & Shapes, installation view, 2009. All works untitled, various dates; left wall: charcoal on paper; right wall and floor: ceramic. Courtesy of Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.

Bay Area sculptor Dennis Gallagher's posthumous survey exhibition, "Forms & Shapes," presents a comprehensive range of work--from massive stacked ceramic sculptures, to smaller maquettes and assemblages, plates, and drawings. Given that the 57-year-old artist tragically passed away earlier this year, the instance of five large, vertical sculptures all produced in 2009 is a testament to his protean creativity. The exhibition is punctuated by the inclusion of earlier work, which hints at his development from abstract and monochromatic (mostly white) sculptures through the more complex, representational, and often functional work of recent years. The drawings--especially the bold, black-line series from 1991--are to be understood equally as working sketches and powerful explorations of abstraction.

Gallagher, like many artists, early on adapted a select range of forms into his sculptural vocabulary, putting them through their paces often in defiance of gravity and, indeed, interpretation. And yet almost in spite of themselves, the works evoke a wealth of references, from classical motifs such as the Three Graces and the shafts of Ionic columns, to Constructivist assemblages of Merzbau-like ambition, and Brutalist architecture. Even at their most menacing, however, a measure of humanity runs throughout the obviously handmade irregularity of their forms and surfaces, pitted, scarred and roughly glazed as they are. The gallery's somewhat theatrical lighting lends gravitas to the staging of what, when viewed as a totality, could ultimately be understood as totems to the memory of failed modernist Utopias.

Dennis Gallagher: "Forms & Shapes" is on view at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco through October 10, 2009.