Tim Prentice
Maxwell Davidson Gallery
41 East 57 Street
Manhattan
Through Feb. 12

A former architect, Tim Prentice makes kinetic stainless steel and aluminum sculptures, which are sleek, whimsical contraptions in a modernist mode. They owe the obvious debt to Calder and George Rickey, although as feats of imaginary engineering linked to a machine aesthetic, they are related to the work of earlier figures like Tatlin and to various Machine Age artists of the 1920's and 30's, and in their use of simple, repeating, industrial forms they even bring to mind Minimalism.

All of this is probably loading too much historical baggage onto Mr. Prentice's cart. His works are pleasurable and meant to be surprising in the straightforward sense that hard materials are used to create soft, fluid, complex movement. The show includes roughly a dozen sculptures, hung from the walls or projecting from them. Electric fans gently make the sculptures move.

"Oculus," a mobile eight feet wide, like a Chinese lantern, is made of dozens of aluminum rectangles, paperback-sized, precisely suspended in a circle, the elaborate geometry and variety of the intricate, delicately balanced hooks and supporting devices providing the work's main visual excitement. "Arras" is a grid of floating, shimmying squares: an Ad Reinhardt mobile.

"Wire Cat," another mobile, contrasts a plain rectangular grid with a thicket of pointy rods and ties. The rods and ties hold the grid together but, more important, the difference between the placid, flat and smooth grid and the rods—which are, like the back of a porcupine, not a little menacing—make the work something other than a kinetic one-liner.

Mr. Prentice's best work depends on the balance of opposing elements. Traditional mobile-making gains a psychological edge by the inclusion of prickly, paradoxical qualities.