"CELEBRATION" Mixed media on canvas 90" X 72" 2006.

Expression in the arts is all about navigating the white water of the soul. By an alchemy of the imagination, waves of loss and love and doubt find their way into the material/spiritual rhythms of art production.

Alexandra Huber might be called an insider's outsider, who since the late 1980s has tapped sources of primal expressive power, taking her inner child on a series of side trips into adult issues and experience. A native of Munich, Germany, she was in her mid-30s with a master's degree in child development and a family of her own when she began to make childlike drawings and paintings in her basement studio. Prolific from the outset, she has only put on speed over the last two decades, attracting a wide audience both in Europe and the United States.

Untrained in fine arts techniques and oblivious to art history (though probably not ignorant of it), her splashy strokes have all the freshness of a child's spontaneous symbolic marks. Such "freshness" of course involves its own code of conventions, however informal — like those so-called "head-footers." Common to children's drawings throughout the world, they're shorthand emblems denoting human presence: a big head is attached directly to feet or legs. Features like ears or arms are absent or included only as afterthoughts. Haptic scribbling is another device, which in a typical child's drawing might convey little beyond simple impatience. As adapted by Huber, though, a tangle of lines is made to connote confusion or motion, or even the ambivalence of human intimacy.

Huber inflects this universal syntax of childhood with an intense self-awareness, giving an introspective voice to what might otherwise be read as inchoate visual ramblings. She often adds words in English and German and it is this combination of exuberant spontaneity of line and color with the relatively orderly assumptions of written language that lends her work real power. Standing astride childhood and maturity, they strum new chords, suggesting a logical continuum of growth and symbol knitting the mind together over decades of personal transformation.

Inner Navigations at Headfooters Gallery consists of 30-some Hubers, the majority of which are six-inch-square drawings on paper, examples of a series of self-explorations that lie at the core of the artist's daily practice. Those quick sketches are complemented by medium and large paintings, some on unstretched canvas, that crash into the field of vision with a nearly audible crescendo of color and form. One created especially for this exhibit is called "Celebration." Measuring seven-and-a-half by five feet, it shows a group of happy-looking men and women, linked together in a circle. They might be dancing, but they're certainly moving. Varied and vibrant black lines curl across the surface defining various linked poses. Huber's figures are rarely isolated and here they're drawn together by underlying splashes of color and twisting, manic passages of line. Balloon-like heads, with excited red spots on their cheeks, smile, framed by a bright yellow background. Shapes executed in white paint add tonal variation to a painting that is as much about the way line can be deployed to occupy a color field as it is about sheer elation. Also interesting is the fact that at least three figures in the group have fully developed torsos and limbs. Maybe this extra articulation has to do with the focus of the piece, on group dynamics and a less inward emphasis on physical interaction.

That such deliberate choices relating to materials and composition as well as intellectual interpretation are all an integral part of Huber's process is evident everywhere at the exhibit. Another large painting on display called "Up and Down" also depicts a group of people, this time in a big red raft. Seen in profile peeking above the sides of the craft, eight black heads are wide-eyed but otherwise calm, even stolid. Their situation, though, would seem to justify more excitement, since the raft is bent almost double as it heads toward the left side of Huber's canvas. It's afloat in a chunky river of deep blue, painted over patchwork collage elements; above the water and behind their heads is a solid sky of goldish yellow, like the background of an illuminated manuscript. Another of Huber's occasional optical/compositional devices is an obsessive-looking series of dots, used to bring numerical order into unstable emotional situations. In "Up and Down," the dots are red, matching the title of the piece (written in the upper right hand corner), and are deployed above each head like thoughts or prayers.

But it may be that Huber's most insightful works are the little ones, where she seems to cram telling observations onto the casual paper squares until there is room for no more — or just the opposite, making elegantly simple linear statements, usually augmented by a splash of color. "About Rowing the Souls" is an all-black-and-white drawing of a couple, facing each other and bound together by a curving black shape enclosing them at the waist. Two mysterious horse hoof-like shapes at either side belie the idea of a boat; it's more like a picture of a double-centaur galloping in the little white paper window. Sometimes her single figures can be ridiculously charming, like one titled "Midlife Flower." Funny and fey, it shows a large flower growing out of a woman's head — although the woman is more like a chicken, with stick legs that bend the wrong way and a feather-studded breast. Some of these small, descriptive studies are intriguing in part because they suggest a specific context for images that could be seen as far more universal. In "Duty Manager" a central figure that looks like a self-portrait is surrounded by the wide aura of its own multiple arms and hands — a version of Shiva, maybe; strangely, another large face is blazoned like a T-shirt image on her torso. Is this really a depiction of multitasking as the title might imply, or is it something very different, a study of human action as it falls away into oblivion, disappearing between frustration and eternity? At her best Huber revisits a remote yet familiar world that persists beyond childhood, concealed beneath grown-up ways of seeing like a forgotten road to perceptual wisdom.

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