With nearly 16 pieces from the last 7 years, this exhibition provides a potent dose of John McCracken's particular brand of Minimalism, which developed in the mid-1960's in California and has been true to its basic premises ever since.
Mr. McCracken, first known for tall, boardlike slabs that simply lean against the wall, is keeping the formalist faith. He continues to favor closed, geometric volumes and bright, strong high-gloss monochromes just this side of garish. A raspberry red, azure blue and rich purplish black predominate here, on leaning slabs, wedge shapes and rectilinear forms that sit high on the floor or hug the wall like fat shelves.
Also important is an air of perfection so extreme that the fact that these works are handmade is at first astounding but quickly becomes the only logical explanation. (Sometimes the surfaces suggest further developments in Japanese lacquer, sometimes large, reshaped pool balls.)
The lurking sense of the artist's hand opens a continental divide between Mr. McCracken's efforts and the industrially fabricated work of New Yorkers like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin.
Mr. McCracken takes the visual ambiguities of their efforts (and also of Larry Bell, another California Minimalist) to the point of confounding illusion. His shapes can seem hollow or like chunks of solid color; their reflective surfaces often have a shape-shifting effect on form and edge.
Some pieces work better than others, with the leaning slabs, which have become as tall as columns, still the best. Their fetishized surfaces and intense colors contradict their casual, no-fuss installation, yet all conspire to present the viewer with something that occupies real space but seems to exist for the eye alone.
Needing the wall, but not hanging from it, these pieces refuse to enter completely the realm of either painting or sculpture. Nearly everything else here, except some of the black pieces, seem limited to one category or the other, which gives them a kind of esthetic ''function.'' The slabs refuse any function, remaining aloof, optical and still strange, after all these years.