Hollywood

The visual stew Robert Anderson makes of rooms and things dissolving into a primordial puddle has always had a kind of repulsive fascination. His squiggly line ink drawings take an adolescent delight in things that ooze, rot or mutate. Yet underlying all the yeasty transformation is drawing with all the linear subtlety and complexity of an Albrecht Durer engraving.

His newest drawings and lithographs strongly evoke Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of hell within the dismembered bodies of the damned. This gives Anderson’s images a kind of moral overtone, as if the festering bogs were a warning against pollution and biological warfare. But the transformation of matter into goop comes across less as a warning than a joke of nature which sees no distinction between the evolution of a microbe and the breakdown of the human species.

Anderson’s junk sculptures suggest home-grown life forms evolved from an urban trash heap. Humorous in their junky-Muppet humanity, yet occasionally poetic in the way the odds and ends go together, pieces like “Mr. X” have the whimsy of Arte Povera transformer toys. (Space Gallery, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd., to Jan. 14.)