James Welling, “Quadrilaterals,” 2008, suite of nine photo engravings with aquatint.

Beautifully presented and installed, the complete editions from Edition Jacob Samuel provide a showcase for artists’ prints. The artists in the exhibition share little in common beyond their collaboration with the publisher. Samuel, well-known in the international art world, was an unfamiliar name to art audiences until this summer. He occupies the enviable position of being an entirely independent publisher and printmaker who can pick and choose his projects. What makes his practice unique is his “portable studio,” the printmaking materials, which he brings to the artist’s studio, no matter where s/he lives. Using the available materials on site, the artist is in charge of the creative process and it is Samuel’s purpose to realize the creator’s vision. Samuel is a meticulous craftsperson who puts his considerable skills at the service of the artist, serving as a discrete intermediary who uses his deep understanding of a particular artist’s work in the pas-de-deux of collaboration. To respond to Rebecca Horn’s aversion to the mirror image, Samuel used a new kind of paper that was transparent, thus preserving the artist’s original images. The result was a suite of prints the color of blood, mounted on paper that matched the creamy skin of the redheaded artist. Just as the flow of blood is one of Horn’s trademarks, the prints of Anish Kapoor are immediately recognizable as the artist’s aesthetic, with the velvet surfaces and the deep colors mirroring his trademark powdered pigments. Conversely, the prints from Chris Burden are entirely unlike his tough-guy ethos: charming tales of encounters with coyotes, written on notebook paper in a childlike hand, with illustrations interspersed. Many of the suites of prints are combined with the artist’s writings, so this exhibition has attracted the literary crowd. Spread through a number of rooms, this compelling collection of master prints reveals both new and familiar sides of some of the great artists of our time (Hammer Museum, West Los Angeles).
Jeanne Willette

Monika Rittershaus, from “Das Rheingold,” 2010, fine art ink jet print on silver rag, 35 1/2 x 53”.

“Der Ring des Nibelungen,” Richard Wagner's epic four opera cycle recently completed its ballyhooed run in Los Angeles. Staged and directed by Achim Freyer, this production’s elaborate and unconventional staging has been beautifully documented by photographer Monika Ritterhaus. Already a renown theatre photographer, Ritterhaus served as the exclusive photographer for L.A. Opera's “Ring,” and what we see here captures its dramatic lighting, costumes, and staging in one crisp and elegant image after another. Allowing the layers of the performance to come through, the photographs allude to not only the depth of the drama, but to the complex relationships formed on stage. Each image is carefully composed, taking into consideration that its an isolated moment of a long work. The individual frames convey that they are but an instant within a much larger narrative. Ritterhaus' “Ring” is more than a series of publicity stills, and although they sell one on the performance they record, they stand as works of art in their own right (Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica).
Jody Zellen

Denis Darzacq, from the “Hyper” series, color photograph.

“Hyper,” the title of Denis Darzacq’s most recent suite of photographs, features a mélange of young men and women floating and/or careening in the aisles of Parisian-area hypermarchés. One wouldn’t be off, however, if you were to interpret the figures as spazzing out – literally being hyper – amidst the onslaught of consumer products. Selections from an earlier body of work - the series “La Chute” - is also included. In this suite, young men are caught mid-flight out in the streets, bearing a strong association to Parkour, the gymnastics-cum-urban-obstacle-course sport best known and practiced in France. In fact, in both series the subjects are street dancers. The elegance with which Darzacq captures the subjects mid-float, as if falling to the supermarket floor, or flying through its aisles, offsets the cloying pastel palette of objects of consumer desire. To whatever extent “Hyper” is a comment on the insignificance of working-class banlieue immigrant communities in the face of Paris’ unforgiving and unrelenting consumerist society, the balletic freeze-frames of the dancers is a more-than-worthy formal feat in itself (Kopeikin Gallery, West Hollywood).
Michael Shaw

Henry Leutwyler, “Triumph Tour Capezio Shoe Top,” 1981, 2008.


"Neverland Lost: A Portrait of Michael Jackson" is a dazzling exhibition of photographs by Henry Leutwyler. These close up color photographs of Jackson's studded gloves, decorated shoes and socks and jackets, as well as miscellaneous trinkets and toys are presented against a stark black background. Each object thus speaks for itself and, in a way, shatters the Jackson myth. While many of the items retain their glittery appeal, others show the wear and tear, the simple ordinariness of everyday objects. The glove, an iconic Jackson trademark, is presented as a disembodied object, and as such is both a powerful presence and a reminder of the power of the archetypes. The exhibition conveys an atmosphere of celebration, but it is also very much nostalgic and melancholic in that it depicts what was taken away from our popular culture. If the man is no longer alive, he is embodied here, remembered by what Neverland lost.

“Jones Beach” represents selections from Joseph Szabo’s photographic observations taken over a 35-year period at this Long Island summer outpost, from the end of the 1960s into the early 2000s. If you ever need to explain the expression “Bridge and Tunnel” to someone, you’d be well-served using Szabo’s work as your guide: lots of big hair, Guidos, a certain urban-meets-suburban aggression that Szabo bracingly captures, mostly among youth but a few from the middle-aged set as well. One standout image, “Priscilla” (1969), features a tough young lady all of about 12, with a cigarette dangling from her mouth as she hikes up her bathing suit. Also from ’69, “Jones Beach Madonna” wears a modern bikini top and a cross around her neck; she is simultaneously right out of Da Vinci (M+B Fine Art, West Hollywood).
JZ/MS

Patrick Graham, “Wreath, “ 2005-6, oil on canvas, 72 7/8 x 134 5/8”.


A museum caliber show of recent drawings and selected paintings done over the last 25 years by Patrick Graham are paired with sketchbook drawings of the 1930s by Arshile Gorky. The Gorky’s on display are quite fine, but are matched if not challenged by the power of Graham, an artist whose prodigious footprint in the history of modern and contemporary Irish and international art we are yet to watch fully unfold. The Gorky and Graham works play against and complement each other in this way: Both bodies of work remind us with definitive authority that at the base of all compelling abstraction is a mastery of form and draftsmanship so innately owned by its maker that it becomes the given, the breath and armature from which every other experiment emanates and succeeds. Graham’s drawings display both skill and connotative power, but he is not content with that. He has the courage — or Celtic madness — to go back and bury the visually accessible and alluring original image with layers and layers of just as carefully applied paint, with gestures that seem to find themselves as he works, and with added scribbled words that tumble from tumultuous Ab Ex fields. A deeper mode of expressing comes shining through in the language of gestures so raw they singe us. What is wonderful about this show is that you get to see aspects of this process unfold at many points. The smaller drawings contain assiduous figurative passages — a foreshortened neck inclines away from us, is brute, sexual, delicate and suffering, as well as perfectly achieved with one or two adroit lines. There are excellent canvases on view as well. In these, peeking out from the chalky, inchoate surfaces you see that very perfect limning acting as the formal and emotive fulcrum (Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Miracle Mile).
Marlena Donohue

Robert Graham, “Lauren 4.17.96,” 1996, bronze, 4 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 7 1/2”.


Selected sculptures in cast bronze, porcelain, works on paper, and Polaroid and digital pictures make up the current solo show of the late Robert Graham. Two black and white portraits of Graham unified in a single frame are positioned at the entrance of the gallery, the artist inhaling and exhaling smoke from the nub of a cigar. He surveys, with a critical gaze, those who view his work.  “Selected Works” brings the viewer into Graham’s creative process as small-scale bronze renderings of women, titled “Bronze Drawings,” are paired with photographic studies. Each includes the name of the model and the date when the piece was created. Small wooden pedestals beneath the photographs display delicate sculptures of women capable of fitting in one’s hand, presented in contorted positions. Some bend their knees toward their chest with arms extended beyond the frame of their body. The small scale of the series implies that the works may have been used as an inspiration for larger works. However Graham’s masterful and detailed handling of the small bronze sculptures impart a sense of grandiosity that sometimes rivals the importance of a large scale work. A lone wall on the opposite end of the gallery showcases several 10 x 8 inch aqua-resin panels. The female form is carved out of the surface and appears to escape from the panels that imprison them (Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica).
A. Moret

John Sonsini, “Francisco, Fernando, Rafael,” 2009, oil on canvas, 72 x 60”.


John Sonsini’s portraits of day laborers reveal a segment of society that is undocumented in more ways than one. Men from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, though an important part of our work force, remain for the most part, shadowy figures among us that are seldom depicted by artists. Painted with a wide brush in radiant hues, Sonsini’s subjects are placed against neutral backgrounds of luminous pinks and blues, their forward stances and gazes intensely confrontational. Their predominant props are luggage and hats, tools of the trade for those whose livelihoods depend on travel and working in the sun. Seeming to conform to an unspoken dress code that includes baggy trousers and oversized shoes, they evoke an aura of  expectation and hopelessness, an appearance that is vulnerable yet made dignified by their attempts to navigate their new environments. Although appearing to be caught in the act of waiting for work - and that is indeed where Sonsini finds his subjects - they have been brought to his studio and paid to pose. Perhaps that is why these laborers seem less individualistic and more representative of a specific ethos. Historically, this has been done before. Sonsini’s portraits, however, are more unsettling, perhaps because his subjects are people who walk often ghost-like among us, unrecognized for the humanity that is their due (Acme Gallery, Miracle Mile).
Elenore Welles

Rachel Harrison, “asdfjkl;” 2010, installation view.


“Asdfjkl;” (the title describes the eight keys your fingers rest on while typing) packs a wallop that’s typically been missing from the inclusion of just one or two of Rachel Harrison’s cryptic, video/sculpture hybrids that have popped up in various group shows. This sprawling solo show includes one of the aforementioned hybrids, “AA,” a video projected onto a t-shirt-covered object, which intrigues but tries one’s patience. It is accompanied by “Vampire Wannabees,” a wood/polystyrene/cement/acrylic-and-assorted-objects tower that is aggressively garish. It is so aggressively anti-aesthetic that it ends up pushing aesthetics to another level. On the walls are photo collages that have a creepy, exquisite corpse quality to them. These echo and depend upon the sensibility of Paul McCarthy’s masks. A second and more successful grouping of the tower sculptures are placed alongside the most profoundly satisfying work in the show, “Voyage of the Beagle,” a side-by-side grouping of about 50 framed photos featuring a menagerie of costumed cartoon characters, mannequins and sculptures of secular and religious icons. “The Beagle” digs into our wildly pluralistic assortment of cultural legacies from below, drawing a visceral reaction that speaks deeply to the issue of oversaturation, but without hitting us over the head with it (Regen Projects, West Hollywood).
MS

Robert Heinecken, “Soci Fashio Lingerie #1,” 1981, found image and incised found image, pencil, found magazine text, masking tape on matboard, 18 x 14”.


Leigh Ledare combines “found images with intimate photographs of his ex-wife shot by both himself and her current husband at the same location on different weekends.” Although the statement you have just read may sound as if it could have been lifted from an internet porn site, it actually references an engaging examination of current parallel investigations into advertising and pornography, addressing issues initially raised by the late Robert Heineken. “They Have Not the Art to Argue with Pictures” includes Ledare’s exposures along with provocative contemporary works by Erik Frydenborg, Nicolás Guagnini, Wade Guyton, Amanda Ross-Ho and Collier Schorr that encircle four glassed-over display tables. The tables also contain magazine alterations and satires on fashion photography produced by Heinecken between 1969 and 1990. Heinecken’s subversions of the traditional art exhibition and distribution practices used to sanctify his tart, Post-Modernist pulp magazine appropriations (like reliquaries in their vitrines) can take some getting used to. This tribute to Heinecken’s ability to make transparent the porn strategies used by the fashion industry, refreshed as it is here by the work of younger artists who build on his willingness to flip, invert, print through, etc., is worthy of respect (Cherry and Martin, Culver City).
Diane Calder

Aaron Curry, installation view, David Kordansky Gallery, 2010.


Following his Hammer Project from late 2008/early 2009, Aaron Curry’s “Two Sheets Thick” pushes his sculpture and 2-D work into an even more immersive mode of surrealism. The contrast from the dull tones of the walls – covered in black-and-white silkscreens – to the bright colors of the towering freestanding sculptures creates a boldly charged environment, one made intriguingly slippery by the transition from the walls to the floor. The walls are papered with repeating patches of water rivulets, which are extended into a couple of the sculptures, which in turn stand somewhat mock-triumphantly on powder-coated aluminum bases with pushcart wheels (painted the same colors as the stands). There seems to be a lot of self-referential quoting going on, though mainly on a formal level: The reflective rivulets become faux metal in the aforementioned sculptures, and crop up again in smaller mixed media, black-and-white collages. Other small works are either brightly-colored abstractions that, based on one smaller collage, appear to be culled from “Monsters, Inc.” stills, or are limited to black and white patterns; this all heightens the sweepingly graceful back-and-forth between the saturated and the dull.  The two bright, neon-colored sculptures, which have a Guernica-in-3D feel, are custom-fit to the installation, and would struggle to not come off as overly-derivative modernist relics on their own. But that’s completely fine. Curry thrives as an installation artist as much as a sculptor – each piece is meant to live in concert (David Kordansky Gallery, Culver City).
MS

Hillary Brace, “Untitled (#09f),” 2009, charcoal on mylar, 6 5/8 x 13”.


Hilary Brace’s drawings continue to capture the enormity of cyclonic clouds, water whirlwinds, and mammoth mountains in a post-card size frame. In fact, the small size makes the natural disasters and occurrences seem intimate and rouses a sense of curiosity to confront the image up close and observe every minute detail. Brace’s art practice is reductive in that she begins with a Mylar surface covered in charcoal which she removes with an eraser systematically, yet without any premeditation. The narrative in her works unfolds as subtly as the manner in which she creates them. Marc Bohne’s paintings, on the other hand, are matter-of-fact pastoral renderings of winding roads and countrysides. The autumnal hues favored here make the scenes, like Brace’s works, appear surreal. While the two artists employ divergent means of depicting and presenting nature, their works are equally ominous as well as being vacant of any human forms (Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica).
AM

Maya Lin, “The Tuolumne River,” 2010, pins.


“Wall Installations” is a stunning group exhibition presenting works by Teresita Fernandez, Kira Lynn Harris, Maya Lin, Richard Long, Karin Sander, James Turrell, Robert Therrien and Peter Wegner that in more cases than not, are painted on or embedded into the wall. Exhibitions featuring site specific works like this are bold in that the works exist only for the duration of the show, and to be acquired or seen again must be recreated. Galleries do not often stage exhibitions with multiple artists making temporary works, and besides this fact what makes this show stand out is how beautifully the works look together and how they inform and enhance each other's content. Wegner's “BLAZING SUN / SUMMER SUNSET” presents an expanse of two colors, yellow and orange, accompanied by their color names. When seen in relation to Karin Sander's almost invisible glossy white rectangle and Lin's “The Tuolumne River,” depicted by inserting thousands of pins into the wall, a landscape theme clearly begins to emerge. The experience of a typical Richard Long walk is represented in words; while Fernandez' circular compositions are readily seen as the Earth during night and day. Harris brings us back indoors with fragments of the Bradbury building's interior as chalk drawings on a black wall. The gallery's large space gives each work room to breath. Most of these works have a strong individual presence, but it is in the context of one another that they truly resonate (William Griffin Gallery, Santa Monica).
JZ

Jay Davis, “Lion,” 2010, watercolor, gouache and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 1/4”.


Photographs by Yvonne Venegas explore the eccentric and socially paradoxical life of the wife of millionaire and former politically corrupt Tijuana Mayor, Jorge Hank Rohn. “Maria Elvia de Hank” explores the wife’s life of privilege in Mexican culture, but the chaos and frenzy represented by the Tijuana media and the suspicion surrounding her spouse’s spurious dealings are blatantly absent in the series. A distinct division of gender roles is prominent as the wife serves as protector of the child about to be baptized, and is bound to the sphere of domesticity and private parties. Meanwhile men escape to vast mountainous landscapes, and are associated with the construction of a casino, bullring and football stadium. Perhaps the juxtaposition of public spaces under construction and the private sectors of family life are meant to draw comparisons between the personal and protected lives of the very publicly watched Mayor. An image like “Nirvana” captures a pre-adolescent boy and girl dressed in prim party clothes with their heads resting against gold plates. It seems that despite (or because of) the world of privilege, ennui sets in at an early age.  Issues of shady ethics are oddly deferred when this world is recorded for posterity.

“Safari” marks a transition for Jay Davis from acrylic on vinyl paintings, shown here in three years ago, to mixed media on paper. Yet the new works carry equal if not greater intricacy and formal innovation. Landscapes such as “Topical” and “Guardrail” have representational elements and scenes that give way to the mostly abstract “Sleepy Hollow.”  A master of color as well as with layering forms, by combining all the major water-based mediums – acrylic, gouache and watercolor – Davis leaves you fully sated visually and even reeling from his deftness. He also manages to mix his range of style while never going too far afield, particularly with “Sunset City” and even more so with “The Band,” which experiments with a more primitive figuration (Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica).
AM/MS

John O’Brien has been asking himself this question central to abstraction his whole career: What is the relationship between objective phenomenon and their "deeper formal-emotive abstract structure?” It led O’Brien to make sculptures echoing precisely the tools he uses to make the object with — a desk, a shelf. These are often skewed in surreal ways so that function is mitigated just enough to allow us to consider the formal and metaphoric abbreviations. He brings all this together in a quirky fashion here. For example, a found museum display case is appropriated to hold free-form, abstracted responses by the artist to sections of works by Arshile Gorky rendered as linear drawings in 3-D wire. Above the desk-display-pedestal-cum sculpture are drawings in which O'Brien takes the process of abstracting from Gorky's abstraction one step further. These riff on the idea of the museum or the archive. O’Brien uses found photos of archeological and other 20th century museum galleries. He subjects these to a digital printing process that transfers them as ghostly, highly summarized shapes onto slick paper. He then prints the same images above and below — like a mirror image in water caught and reversed at a centrally placed horizon line. Finally he goes back into the transferred photos and leads us through the shadowy, barely suggestive spaces with truly inspired hand applied passages of paint, tight drawing, and spontaneous scribbles. He attenuates this section, pulls this coincidentally evocative shape relation out for our view, turning the architecture of the image into a kind of x-ray of what all things hold at deeper levels of conception and imagination (Kristi Engel Gallery, Northeast Los Angeles).
MD

From the Florentine Codex, “The Birth of Huizilopochtli,” compiled by Bernardino de Sahagun, 16th century.


A majestic bronze eagle, emblem of Rome’s Imperial supremacy, looks out over it’s Aztec counterpart, a squat basalt offering vessel, designed to hold the hearts of sacrificed captives. It is surrounded by an impressive collection of the first Mesoamerican works of art ever to be displayed at that sanctuary of European antiquities, in The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire. The positioning of the powerful Roman embodiment of Jupiter, symbol of the sun and divine justice, stimulates the kind of contemplation your art history teacher induced by asking you to “Compare and contrast . . .” Marking the bicentennial of Mexican independence, this intriguing exhibition examines the convergence of empires through art and cultural myth during Spain’s colonization of the Americas, an era when Europe was coincidentally rediscovering its Greco-Roman past. In an attempt to explain New World religious beliefs, Aztec deities such as Huitzilopochtl, god of the sun and war and Tezcatlipoca, god of magic and darkness, were likened to Hercules and Jupiter. The Spanish placed inordinate emphasis on any depictions of Aztec sacrificial ceremonies in order to wrap in acceptable and familiar forms their own eradication of pagan temples and codices. Following the devastation of Tenochtitlan, the Franciscan friar Father Sahagún collaborated with indigenous students who learned Latin rhetoric and theology under his tutelage in illustrating the “Florentine Codex.” Expressly for this exhibition, this iconic history returns from Europe to the New World for the first time in four centuries. Equally fascinating is a Japanese styled 17th-century screen that blends fantasy and fact in its panoramic depiction of encounters between Hernán Cortés and Motecuhzoma II (Montezuma) (The Getty Villa, West Side).
DC

Lisa Brown, “The Latke was Suffering so much that It Leapt out of the Hot Pan and Out the Window of the Cottage, and Began to Run Screaming Down the Boulevard,” illustration from Lemony Snicket, “The Latke Whom Couldn’t Stop Screaming,” 2007.


You need not be Jewish or juvenile to fall under the spell of the work showcased in “Monsters and Miracles:  A Journey through Jewish Picture Books” by artists and storytellers skilled at informing and entertaining their audiences. Journey down the path that leads past alphabet primers used in medieval Cairo and lavishly illustrated historical liturgical histories recounting the Exodus. Examine early illustrations and graphic designs by Marc Chagall and El Lissitzky. View romantic interpretations of Jewish life in the villages of Eastern Europe and later migrations to Spain and the New World. Pause to add your own collage to a mural featuring Jonah’s whale or revamp a monster with feather boas before meeting the beloved Curious George and Shrek. View familiar favorite picture books including “Where the Wild Things Are” (with characters based on relatives who first captured Maurice Sendak’s imagination when he was a boy). Grab a pair of headphones and listen to authors and artists, including Tony Kushner, Ed Asner and Leonard Nimoy, narrate their favorite stories. By the time you reach the most recent collection of children’s books, those offering alternative narratives and changing trends such as Lemony Snicket’s “The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story,” you may decide to start all over and take a second look (Skirball Cultural Center, West Los Angeles).
DC

The C.O.L.A. award is an annual grant given to ten Los Angeles artists who are given a year to make new work to be exhibited at Barnsdall Park. The exhibition is never meant to cohere as a curated show, but rather presents the work of the ten artists who have been awarded grants for their commitment to their practice. The 2010 recipients are: Fumiko Amano, Linda Arreola, Sean Duffy, Sam Erenberg, Mary Beth Heffernan, Jesse Lerner, Brian C. Moss, Michael Pierzynski, Rebecca Ripple, and Tran T. Kim-Trang. Surprisingly the “C.O.L.A. 2010 Show” holds together better as a cohesive show than its has in the past as there are connections and relationships that can be draw between the works. The awardees typically create work in all media, and this year’s exhibition is no exception, as the show includes painting and sculpture, video, and installation works (Barnsdall Park, Hollywood).
JZ

Michael Corinne West, “Red Composition,” 1967, oil on canvas, 60 x 48”.


Seeing a group of truly fine paintings straight out the best of the Abstract Expressionist era, one might be forgiven for wondering - why was Michael West forgotten? The answer says everything about art world biases and blindness half a century ago: West was a woman. With colleagues such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and overshadowed by her friend Arshile Gorky, West suffered the fate of a woman of that time. No matter how talented, she was invisible in the mid-century man’s world. Based on what we see here, had West been a man, he would have been ranked among the founders of the New York School. She took Hoffman’s combination of Cubism and Expressionism and by the mid-Forties moved to total abstraction completely committed to expressionism. At the same time that Pollock was edging towards his drip phase, West was using metallic paints along with traditional oils, applied swiftly and thickly. Later her canvases were punctuated with drips and blotches and squeezes of paint, but she always retained the underlying Cubist grid as the armature of her all-over slashes of color. The marks convey the anguish of the Cold War era, as do the preference for blacks, dark browns, deep solemn reds, sword colored metals all laid down in great whacks of frustrated strokes. The paintings are all dark and full of suffering; only occasionally does yellow glimmer through, sometimes a blue. Wkhen she forayed into stained painting, West never went big and expanded into an optical field. She always obeyed the edges and allowed the mid-sized canvases to breath and lay bare beneath the thick strands of solid paint, the slathered strokes, and the delicately textured patches. She allowed the shape of the support to discipline her free handling (Art Resource Group, Orange County).
JW

Charlotta Westergren, “La Nature Morte,” 2010, oil on linen, 50 x 50”.

Seven paintings by Charlotta Westergren are meticulous in their renderings and brush strokes and profound in command of her media, including automotive paint and oils. Deeply colored automotive paint over aluminum (with details in oil) in two larger works provides a luminous background for precise compositions of animals and flowers. The horizontal composition, “La Nature Morte au Cochon,” depicts a pig’s head and other body parts surrounded by floating flowers and butterflies. The vertical “Unicorn,” a large unicorn head with blue eyes set against deep blue sky and flowers, lends the mythical animal human qualities. While being drawn to these compelling images, we soon questioned their symbolism. The artist explains that the pig in “La Nature Morte au Cochon” “is a symbol of gluttony, and the butterfly, the transformation of the soul.” With this work and with “Unicorn,” she explains, “context is intentionally transformed through the medium.” As unicorns were depicted in serious works of art centuries ago, and more recently in popular culture, this painting alludes to the artist’s sense of an uneasy relationship between works from the Renaissance and those of today. These two paintings, plus five others in oil and acrylics, add up to a small show that is exceptionally immersive (Arin Contemporary Art, Laguna Beach).
Liz Goldner