Industrial strength retrospective

Revered Boston printmaker's work is study in detail

Sidney Hurwitz grew up in Worcester, surrounded by factories and railroad tracks. Born in 1932, he saw industry prosper when he was a boy and decline when he was a young man. No wonder the grit, majesty, and eventual torpor of the industrial landscape has become his passion.

The artist, one of Boston's revered printmakers and teachers, has a meditative retrospective up at Boston University Art Gallery. Hurwitz, an expert technician, is an artist of fine details that add up to complex, nuanced compositions. A single print invites extended contemplation, as layers of meaning unfold. Industrial landscapes are the playground of the abstract artist, with their variety of planes, lines, forms, textures, and tones. Hurwitz focuses his viewer's eye on each, but at some magic moment they coalesce into a daunting whole.

Hurwitz didn't start out documenting steel plants and bridgeworks. He studied with printmaker Leonard Baskin, known for his mythic figural woodcuts, and then at Brandeis University and BU, where the focus in the 1950s was also on figurative Expressionism. His early prints here are woodcuts in this vein, such as "Descending" (1964), in which a nude man, portrayed in loose, deep lines, splays his arms and throws his head back. In the context of Hurwitz's quiet, methodical oeuvre, it seems almost laughably anguished.

In 1972 he went to London. The cityscape there grabbed his imagination, and he took to making the intaglio prints that have become his trademark. For the remarkable etching and aquatint "Highbury Station" (1973), the mature artist seems to burst fully formed out of the grappling apprentice. It's a glimpse of what's to come: the platform, dark tracks, and climbing stairway exits of a tube station; the shuffling of planes; the degrees of textured gray - all fit neatly together like the notes of a sonata.

Back in Boston, he captured three vantage points of "Fort Point Channel Bridge" (1975), getting closer each time to the gears and rails of the drawbridge until we're in so close he nearly pins us. In the 1980s, he added watercolor to his prints. In "Station Stairs" (1982) he depicts the behemoth of the old elevated MBTA Orange Line, with its copper-green and rusty orange facade.

Hurwitz took to visiting steel plants. "USX-Gary I" (1996) is a feat of careful composition: a central tower, with conveyor ramps dropping diagonally down. Often Hurwitz goes at his subjects with frontal force; the plane of the central building parallels that of the picture plane, placing his viewer in confrontation with his subject. But these are imposing sites. In the end, Hurwitz's work is no less mythic than that of his teachers. He portrays giants at the height of their powers and in the midst of their tumbles toward death and obscurity.

There's something cloying and self-consciously childlike about the work of Misaki Kawai, who has several paintings, collages, and sculptures up at LaMontagne Gallery. Naively drawn animals and people hover over lushly painted, bright backgrounds; she does have a hand with paint. She's part of a trend: Many Japanese artists have pursued a cutesy aesthetic in recent years. Kawai had an ambitious if ultimately fey sculptural installation, "Space House," at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 2006.

Still, the show isn't completely saccharine. Kawai's painting "Orange Forest" shows a bear clad in green underwear walking hand in hand with two small children against a neon yellow-and-orange background. A whisper of oddness and threat carries the painting beyond the artist's seeming desire to just play and please into darker, more interesting waters.

Andrew Mowbray has a wittier show in the back room at LaMontagne, considering how museums fetishize objects to the point at which their original use and meaning is nearly erased. He reproduces objects and their display cases or pedestals in white plastic. The most dramatic, "Morris Chair," he pairs with a quote from its designer, Gustav Stickley, about people using the chairs in their homes. The objects, white and brightly lit, seem like calcified ghosts.

Calligraphic gestures, splatters actually drawn with colored pencils, inlaid shards of old drawings, mists of charcoal, splotches of ink - the list of techniques Chuck Holtzman deploys in his gorgeous, deep, and busy drawings goes on and on. The sheer variety of mark-making invokes different qualities of light and depths of space. I saw clutter, frazzled anxiety, networks, and deep, shuddering breaths.

The ground in "Untitled (#795)" is a radiant, upward-thrusting breath of gray. Holtzman inlays hard-edged, inky segments like puzzle pieces and also rounds bits with feather-shaped blots that recall hummocks reflecting on still ponds, all cut up and rearranged. Then there are the colored-penciled splatters, which look gleefully splashed but are painstakingly drawn. There's much happening, but never too much; it's a chaos a viewer can relate to, like too many strands of life pulling at you all at once, with occasional, inviting respite.