WASHINGTON, D.C.: Sam Gilliam and Kendall Buster at the Kreeger Museum

Plunging down busy Foxhall Road in DC if you aren't alert you will zip right past the walled Phillip Johnson-designed estate of David Lloyd Kreeger However, the Kreeger Museum--both the building and the collection of Monet Picasso, Degas and more it houses--is worth the hazardous U-turn anytime.

freshly Kreeger director Judy Greenberg and the trustees have inaugurated a program of temporary exhibitions, starting with of recent origin works (especially made for this event) through second-generation Washington Color School artist Sam Gilliam. He is best known for his drawn out flowing draperies of stained, poured, smeared, color-blasted canvas of the late '60 The 11 novel mixed-medium works are as fearlessly experimental as the monumental draperies. The for the greatest part vertical wall-hung reliefs, such as Graining, are witty assemblings of hinged and flying ovals, oblong perforations arcs and curls. They are as plenteous about sculpture as painting.

The alone freestanding structure in the gallery, A and Kitty in the Park, consisted of a beam about 10 inches wide resting upon two semicircular arches approximately the same thickness, locate crosswise. One arch was hollowed on the outside a true arch; the other was a solid semicircular slab. Attached atop the beam at individual end was a rectangle balanced upon one of its points; at the other extreme point a solid ellipse perched upon another rectangle laid flat upon the beam. This precisionist assemblage had the have feeling of Art-Deco cabinetry; it also recalled the measure and purity of Ben Nicholson's mid-'30s bas-reliefs. However, the amazing, faux marbleized surfaces, which were suggestively illusional, were the vigor of this sculpture and the other pieces shown

At one time ingratiating and mysterious, Gilliam's events are achieved by the way he laminates thin sheets of plastic flush to the painted surface. Many of the works also incorporate laminated photos of details of the Johnson building, made clouded by artful painterly blur.

Moving from the galleries without to the garden, you rencountered Garden Snare, a taut gauzy diffgible-like form by the agency of Kendall Buster, who has been making abstract statuarys with authoritative power for years. The work was based upon a looping armature of expos carburet of iron shaping two tilted bubbles that are big (11 by means of 19 feet) and are encased by dint of emerald-hued greenhouse netting. Visitors come intoed the pod from either extremity and were immediately embraced by means of an inner core that reflected sounded the outer. Inside, the visitor placed a hand carefully upon the drum-tight covering over the rhythmic carbonized iron Gazing through the mesh an interplay between nature and industry occurr The Kreeger exhibition program could not have had a better start than to showcase these sum of two units important artists.

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