LEONARDO DREW
Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

The distinction made by William James between tough-minded and tender-minded personality types breaks down in relation to artist Leonardo Drew. Mr. Drew’s fulsome and elegant exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins includes a sculptural installation, wall reliefs, and large-scale works on paper. He taps a broad range of emotional resonances of materials in states of use and decay.

He has a penchant for rust and rawness that gives his appendaged and scattered stuff a Wagnerian, tragic weight akin to the work of the German artist Anselm Kiefer. But Mr. Drew’s love of intricate, interior spaces — whether implied, with boxes, for example, or manifest, as in the cracks and trenches between the stacks of paper and wood in the 17-foot-high wall relief “Number 122” (2007) — has the lightheaded poignancy of an artist such as Louise Nevelson. The sense of resonant components (“fragments shored against ruin,” to paraphrase T.S. Eliot) arranged in rigid schemes feels like an unlikely collaboration between Joseph Cornell and Sol LeWitt.

The way Mr. Drew pits order and intuition against each other sometimes can appear programmatic. “Number 123,” for instance, installed along several walls, is an array of individual sculptural objects of disparate size and possible function. The strict precision of their placement is at once serene and sinister, equally suggestive of good taste and bureaucratic efficiency. The objects themselves are precariously balanced between utility and abstractness, primitivism and sophistication. You can imagine scenarios for how these odd things come to be ordered the way they are — an arsenal of postapocalyptic weapons arranged in forensic regimen. Or you can relax and enjoy the blend of whimsy and structure in a work in which individuality exists within collective order, rather like an aerial view of a gridded city.

Until May 12 (530 W. 22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-929-2262).