This widely beloved L.A. sculptor and performance artist, who stands six and a half feet tall and weighs north of three hundred pounds, uses his body to bemuse and delight—one previous memorable piece tested how far he could throw people—and employs delicate craft to disarm. The intricate wall reliefs here, which incorporate jigsaw-cut record-album sleeves, traffic in nostalgia for musical tastes, both good and bad, of the past seventy years. 

Martin Kersels characteristically splits the difference between performance and objects in his exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Cut-up and collaged record album covers are hung as relief wall sculptures... Part comedy, part homage, Mr. Kersels’s work is a reminder that, despite the emphasis on art as business, there is still room in Chelsea for the absurd. 

Compared with his large sculptures and audaciously physical performances, Martin Kersels’ pieces at Redling Fine Art are a bit subdued, but not quiet. Three quirky wooden sculptures emit mysterious sounds to an audience of peeping-Tom portraits whose eyes gaze out meekly through holes drilled in planks of wood. The effect is riotously charming and comically odd, like a Dadaist hurdy-gurdy.

One of Martin Kersels’s new sculptures, installed at Redling Fine Art in a show called “Seen and Heard,” has a lever. Push it down, quickly, and it makes a groaning sound. On its way back up, it squeals. It’s all air pressure behind the noises. Kersels, who left L.A. to teach at Yale three years ago, calls the sculpture "Snore." Made of salvaged wood and assembled to look something like a phonograph, it conjures an antique — or an awkwardly rehabbed antique. The same can be said for the other two hand-operated, noise-making objects in the room: a bureau with a motor in its bowels and a leaning pyramid for a head, and a chair with a whirring wood box on its seat. All the “machines” go together and it’s this quaint fantasy of a pre-digital world, only none of Kersels analogue inventions have functions. They just have distinct looks and sounds.

In his first New York solo show in a decade, Los Angeles native Martin Kersels (b. 1960) continues in the Surrealist tradition that celebrates the surprising dislocation and beauty found in what Comte de Lautréamont described as "the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." Few artists—Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse among them—can do enough with only two shapes and two colors to warrant pilgrimages to three separate galleries.

Standing six and a half feet tall and weighing around 350 pounds, Martin Kersels is a big guy. "I don't fit in a lot of places, literally and figuratively," he says in an interview published in the catalogue for his first midcareer retrospective, aptly subtitled "Heavyweight Champion." 

The concise survey of Kersels' work since 1994 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, "Martin Kersels: Heavyweight Champion," opens with a monumental sculpture of a bird's nest. 

Gaston Bachelard wrote that 'a house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability'. The unease attending such fragile assurances of domestic equilibrium underlies much of Californian artist Martin Kersels' recent rambunctious installation.

Deitch Projects 76 Grand Street, SoHo Through March 24 Although seemingly a habitat for little girls, Martin Kersels's ''Tumble Room,'' a small, sweet child's room replete with furniture, dolls, stuffed toys and other amenities, behaves quite viciously.

In the end, the work of most artists is intimately bound up in their identities. But this point has rarely been made as forthrightly or as humorously as in the work of Martin Kersels, a young Los Angeles artist who is having his first show in New York.

The main character in Martin Kersels' cacophonous, stop-and-go drama of a recent solo show is a baby grand piano that noisily trundles from one side of the gallery to the other, digging irregular ruts in the cheaply resurfaced concrete floor as it is dragged back and forth by a cable attached to an electric winch.