Reaching Down Deep to Evoke Core Questions

At L.A. Louver Gallery, a well-selected group of 13 oil paintings and eight bronze sculptures by Danish artist Per Kirkeby serves as a substantial introduction to work that’s well-known in Europe but rarely seen in the United States. Kirkeby’s California debut is an affair of significant magnitude, even though its insistently understated works make such claims sound overblown and pretentious.

In fact, the 58-year-old artist’s paintings are so self-contained and intransigent that few words stick to them. Stubbornly unresolved, these abstract arrangements of color, texture and line appear to originate in the artist’s observation of nature, but the longer you stand in front of them the less certain you are about this seemingly simple idea. The profound doubt that riddles these images is infectious.

Although composed of such bright colors as fiery reds, smoldering oranges and sizzling yellows, there’s nothing flashy about the Dane’s inchoate paintings. Likewise, their dazzling blues, loamy browns, rich greens and regal burgundies do not evoke the organic world’s life-sustaining fecundity as much as they seem to be chiseled out of the Earth’s molten core.

Of course, that’s an impossibility. But the vigorously worked surfaces of Kirkeby’s paintings do look as if they’ve been chipped and hammered, gradually given form by painstaking labor and impressive force.

Adding to their intractable puzzle is their dry, chalky quality. The hot desert air seems to hang on these canvases, unmoved by even the slightest breeze.

For their part, Kirkeby’s small sculptures look like ancient ruins with some sort of prehistoric life-force running through their worn-down, weather-beaten architecture. Cast from clay that the artist has pushed, squeezed, patted and slapped into elemental forms, these ruddy fragments embody a fleshy sense of potential.

As a group, Kirkeby’s paintings and sculptures evoke geological processes whose time spans and scales are so far beyond human scale that they’re almost inconceivable. Without fanfare or ostentation, his inquisitive works invite viewers to ponder their place in such awesome processes.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Feb. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Giddy Energy: Chockablock full of bright colors and goofy symbols suggesting open-ended stories, Elizabeth Murray’s wildly shaped paintings at PaceWildenstein Gallery initially appear to be bursting out of their seams. From most of these elaborate amalgamations of oddly contoured canvases, carved stretcher bars and freely smeared oils, sinuous tentacles snake and compositional fragments fly--as if propelled by irresistible forces.

Depending upon one’s point of view, Murray’s rambunctious works seem to be playfully engaging or mildly menacing, either desirous of getting their fun-loving hands on viewers’ physiques or too aggressively protruding into the space your body occupies. But after a while, every element in these well-constructed compositions settles into its proper place--as determined by the New York School.

Spending some time with Murray’s diagrammatic pictures is a little like spending cocktail hour with long-avoided relatives. When their nervous gregariousness subsides, they mellow into tolerable distractions or easily ignored pests, demeanors you’d rather not deal with but which are harmless in the long run.

Likewise, Murray’s eager, obsessive works strive to capture the wacky energy of animated cartoons but have their feet too firmly planted in the stodgy world of abstract painting to do so. Whenever one of their warped panels or distorted silhouettes starts to pop off the wall, Murray reins it in by painting its edges in the messy, free-wheeling manner of the Abstract Expressionists.

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As a result, the contours of each component seem to scream: “I’m a bona fide painting, not a silly cartoon.” To emphasize this assertion, Murray’s new works contain more running feet of meandering edges than her earlier works, whose structures were less complex.

Moreover, the new paintings’ edges angle inward, increasing their width and more fully exposing the drips, spills and smudges that once covered the sides of the canvases. These clunky works reveal that marrying the giddy energy of cartoons to the rigors of painting is a worthy pursuit and much more difficult than it might sound.

* PaceWildenstein Gallery, 9540 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 205-5522, through March 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Blend and Drift: Michelle Grabner’s modestly scaled paintings at Richard Heller Gallery are not drop-dead beautiful, nor will they knock your socks off with the eye-grabbing impact of much Pop art. Instead, these 12 pictures of abstract patterns found around the house creep up on you slowly, quietly disclosing their little mysteries the more time you spend with them.

Each of the Wisconsin-based painter’s works begins as a panel of raw plywood covered with a thick undercoat of paint that transforms its grainy texture into a perfectly smooth surface. Grabner then lays some mundane domestic article--an afghan, tablecloth, curtain, furnace filter, paper towel or window screen--over the panel, and she applies a light coat of spray paint to both.

After removing the object, she uses the hazy traces left by the spray paint as a sort of paint-by-numbers outline. Patiently filling in the blank spaces between its diaphanous lines with small touches of ordinary enamel house paint, she gradually builds up surfaces whose slight relief resembles fine lace. Her palette matches the soft tones often found in homes, including ivory, beige, gray and taupe, as well as various shades of pale blue, olive green and golden yellow.

The imperfections of Grabner’s hand-painted patterns accentuate the irregularities that naturally take shape when paint is sprayed through things like afghans and door screens. As a result, the tiny dots, thin lines, simple plaids and herringbone patterns that form the surfaces of her works do not snap into taut grids, but instead appear to waver, shimmy and shift, as if a soft breeze were blowing through them.

What’s actually happening, however, takes place inside your eyeballs, as tiny flecks of color and the thin shadows cast by the paint’s contours blend together and drift apart. In front of Grabner’s subtly animated art, ready-made paintings disappear simply because your eyes remake what they see in the present.

* Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Feb. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Surface Studies: In his last solo show, photographer John Humble painted a precise portrait of Los Angeles by capturing its daunting urban sprawl in crystalline prints whose supersaturated colors still looked too crisp and keyed-up to be true, despite belonging to a style of straight, un-manipulated photography. In a new series of fairly large pictures at Jan Kesner Gallery, Humble forgoes the grand panoramas of those sweeping works in favor of images that are up close and intimate.

Not up close and personal. It’s significant that none of Humble’s photographs presume to reveal anything personal about the anonymous people in them. Met by chance on the streets of Venice, Manhattan Beach, San Pedro and Santa Monica, the Angelenos in these pictures disclose only those details they present whenever they go out in public.

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Which isn’t to say that viewers are left without much to see. On the contrary, Humble captures a wealth of expression and information with his hand-held view camera. Especially revealing are his portraits of an elderly downtown jeweler, a father and son holding skateboards, five bike riders wearing sunglasses, a man advertising the Million Man March in a tuxedo on the Venice boardwalk and a couple decked out for Chinese New Year, with full makeup, dazzling robes and headdresses.

In a sense, Humble photographs people the same way he photographs buildings. The urban structures in this exhibition are almost always presented in tightly cropped images, as if sitting for their formal portraits. Particularly poignant are a thrift store on Lincoln Boulevard that looks like an updated version of an Edward Hopper painting, a twilight view of a takeout diner in Mar Vista and an El Segundo apartment that’s dwarfed by industrial smokestacks and electrical towers.

Sticking to the surfaces of buildings and people, Humble’s matter-of-fact photographs demonstrate that if art is sufficiently sensitive to what’s visible, it doesn’t need to get beyond appearances to do its job.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through March 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.