Art review: Ginny Bishton at Richard Telles Fine Art

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Eleven new drawings by Ginny Bishton continue her ongoing interest in tightly compressed images that do a 180 in your head, expanding far beyond immediate expectations. Numbered patterns burn holes in logical systems, rigorously rectilinear formats turn into impossibly curved spaces and sheets of graph paper covered with pencil notations obliterated by inked markings – vertical, horizontal and diagonal – become fields on which empty space looks like a gestural scrawl.

At Richard Telles Fine Art, Bishton manages a variety of engaging Conceptual maneuvers; they pay hommage to such forebears as Bruce Nauman, Sol LeWitt and Hanne Darboven.

The scrawl commemorates the obsessive counting and classifying works made by Darboven, who died last year at 67. A nod to Nauman’s sculptures of knee-prints makes a witty genuflection. And a four-part grid turns a classic LeWitt into a profusion of green beans – a garden of earthly delights.

Three pen-and-ink crosshatch drawings are marvels of formal and conceptual thoroughness. Rectangular patches are arranged as if the strips were piling on one another, although close perusal reveals that none in fact overlaps. The straight, linear formats are interrupted by circular spaces, while other optical illusions likewise appear to contradict the structure. Bishton has a marvelous way with fully integrating seemingly incompatible elements, while maintaining their independent integrity.

– Christopher Knight

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-5578, through Feb. 13. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.tellesfineart.com