The Bay Area has long been associated with mildly expressionistic figurative painting, but in the ’80s installation work has emerged here as another important regional art tendency. San Francisco artist Dawn Fryling belongs to a new generation of installation artists coming up behind already prominent people such as David Ireland, Tony Labat, and Paul Kos.

I’ve seen only two works Fryling has shown and both have been impressively straightforward and lyrical. The first, a piece titled Nine Marks, 1988, appeared in a juried group show. It consisted of nine thrift-shop overcoats hung on the wall in

William Tucker’s recent sculptures are stark, heavy, freestanding cast-bronze chunks, each with a mutable image. As you move around them, tracking successive profile views, their roughly modeled masses slip from one directional emphasis to another, from flexing, truncated anatomical hints to broadly sloping topographic sensations, and back again. Such perceptual episodes modify and hide one another. Meanwhile, the monolithic shape that is their integer stays unperturbed, though constantly elusive, and the big abstract scale is consistent throughout. Then there is the sculptures’ gravitational