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In ‘Last World’, his first New York solo exhibition, Berliner Thomas Helbig offered Frankenstein’s-monsterlike assemblages of found parts an cosmic-abstraction paintings. Titles such as Beseelt (Animated), Erster Tag (First Day) and Schopfung (creation) point to an earnest engagement with spiritual themes. The sculptures, dominated as they are by sleek dark metal, could at first glance pass for pure abstractions, but they are assembled from scaveneged fragments of garden stuatuettes and lawn ornaments, including reproductions of Greek sculptures, which Helbig finds at flea markets and the like. These human and animal parts are combined in uncanny unions punctuated by gobs of black epoxy. The elements of the title piece, Letzte Welt (24 by 21 by 26 inches, all works 2006), form a shell around a hollow core; a downward-facing cherub’s head at the top is surrounded by the headless body of a hairy animal, which in turn disappears into an empty cave. Der Morgan (Morning, 59 by 30 by 23 inches), the largest sculpture, supports itself in part on a golden lions paw. A goat’s head, a woman gowned in gold and other components create an elegantly curving vertical atop which rests the from of a male torso. A crop of hair sprouts from its smooth chest; from underneath the hair, a putto’s crossed legs hang down into empty space. The Gegenwart (whose bilingual title might be translated as ‘Der Present’, 23 by 20 by 19 inches) similarly combines animal and human parts: a boar’s head supports sections of human torsos, topped by a gracefully bowed human back. From it bursts a mass of epoxy, givig the impression of bubbling, foaming liquid, out of which emerges a disembodied pair of slender human hands, recalling Louise Bourgeois’s marble sculptures of the 1990s. Helbig’s large abstract paintings aspire to a similar effect of messy births and roiling energy, but less successfully than the sculptures; without the force generated by the unlikely combinations that mark the three-dimensional works, the paintings carry less charge. Amid washy fields of Frankenthaleresque stained brown in Schopfung (63 by 83 inches), a hazy triangle outlined in blue rests atop lines that shoot across the canvas like Kadinsky’s vectors or recede into space. A distant sphere sports Saturn like rings, as though the painting illustrated the Big Bang itself. In Fremde Vernunft (Strange Reason, 95 by 75 inches), passages of dilute blue-gray paint recalling ranges of misty mountains surround a blue sphere near the canvas’s centre. Alternatively washy and waxy passages of paint surround a dark gashlike vertical at the paintings centre, above which hovers a pale gold halo. In the art world dominated by irony, one welcomes Helbig’s apparent sincerity in approaching ambitious themes such as creation and spiritual renewal. If the results seem, like the elements in his sculptures, not yet fully formed, he has certainly made a promising debut.