Ulrich Rückriem’s eight pieces in blue granite that were shown here, all done in 1986 and left untitled, embody a hard poetry of material and sculptural means. These great blocks of stone, taken from a quarry near Vire, Normandy, were chosen by the artist with this capacious concrete-floored gallery in mind. Four works jut from the walls; four more stand in open space. All possess a splendid clarity of form and execution.

Rückriem settled upon his limited formal vocabulary nearly 20 years ago. Since then he has pursued his artistic program with a rigor and restraint commensurate with the nearly

There’s an aura of the ’50s and early ’60s that hovers over post-Modernism. It can be seen, for example, in David Salle’s allusions to the era’s pulp-magazine style of illustration, behind Eric Fischl’s early-TV melodramas, and within Cindy Sherman’s re-creations of glamour dolls. The mixed media assemblages of Don Baum, made of pieces of patterned linoleum and canvasboards from paint-by-number kits, take a similar glance backward. In the works seen here, which are from 1986 and 1987, Baum recycles this imagery from the pop culture of an earlier decade by cutting it up and using it as the siding