Milan Klic at Reeves Contemporary

Milan Klic was born in the Czech Republic but has lived in the Boston area since studying at Brandeis University in the mid-1980s. His recent show included several whimsical vehicles made primarily of bamboo, as well as mixed-medium wall pieces. Klic has a light hand and a sense of humor that connect his work to the Dada tradition. With their big wheels and winglike canopies, his vehicles look like exquisite flying machines, constructed to be nearly as light as the air they appear destined to move through. Ideal and absurd, they bespeak a wonderfully eccentric imagination.

The vehicle series, which Klic humorously titles "Gypsy Airlines," constituted the main part of his exhibition. Bamboo is a visibly delicate material, yet Gypsy Airlines #2 (2003) is quite monumental at 112 inches high. Its bifurcated canopy rises gracefully from a two-wheeled base something like a bicycle. The combination of idiosyncratic form and fragile materials makes for a beautifully poetic sculpture, in which the linearity of the materials, a kind of drawing in space, suggests the surreal ingenuity of early airplane prototypes. But like the others in the series, the piece is clearly a nonfunctional machine. Klic's strange and useless inventions hold our attention with their quirky takes on form and function.

Klic often works with wheel forms; there is Mission (2004), for example, consisting of a bamboo wheel from which loops of bamboo rise, holding orange cotton balls that seem to hover in a field directly above the wheel. The striking sculpture Achilles (2001) is both classical and constructivist, as Klic placed a Greek warrior's helmet over a kind of chariot wheel. Bamboo strips cascade in curves above the wheel and around the armored helmet.

Triptych (2003) is an attractive trio of tall, narrow, orange-colored vertical elements resembling dugout canoes. Wall-mounted next to each other so that their edges touch, they cradle rows of small steel squares in their shallow openings. In demonstrating his versatility, Klic shows himself to be as much skillful artisan as easygoing metaphysician.

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