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. 

ompared 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.

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.