It used simple, English language-based statements to draw elemental shapes, including circles, points, text, and many types of curves (including lines).

Appropriately, the piece is titled "The Girl Child," and the elemental shapes recall the simplicity of Hindu representations of male and female principles.

Richly glazed and textured, Mr. Sammarco's pedestal scale compositions of elemental geometric shapes have a coolly refreshing beauty.

But where Mr. Long takes a sophisticated route to these elemental shapes, Johan is a gentle simple-minded man, a village baker with a child's sense of the world.

Yet far from being merely cleverly retro, his new compact configurations of elemental shapes have a startling freshness and a robust energy that belie their seemingly modest delicacy.

Every animal, house, tree and figure looks chiseled and squarish: toylike silhouettes stripped down to elemental shapes.

Westermann adopts the vocabulary of minimalist art, using elemental abstract shapes, but at the same time she goes beyond the minimalist rigid, impersonal character.

She winced as one expensive cask after another shattered to provide the fluid needed for the elemental to take corporeal shape.

His paintings, made with a loose, spontaneous touch in thin layers, featured elemental shapes, arabesque forms and archetypal symbols folded into layered, luminously colored spaces.

Far from being merely cleverly retro, however, these small-scale configurations of elemental shapes have a startling freshness and a robust energy that belie their seemingly modest delicacy.