WILSHIRE CENTER

Nancy Spero’s Los Angeles debut pops the cork of a feminist celebration as it christens a new space for a gallery. Her art still has its underbelly--the defiant fist of Artemis, the frantic energy of boneless, primitive dancers, the brute force of women rushing toward an unseen goal and possibly away from oppressors--but the tone is contagiously upbeat. The New York artist has left behind earlier blood-spattered images of women as bombs and torture victims. Now her women are on the move and even if they crawl, fall or break into a gallop, you get the feeling that they are fueled by an inner need so strong that success is inevitable.

Spero’s show consists of just four hand-printed and collaged drawings (1981-85), but all are multipaneled scroll-like pieces and one of them, “The First Language,” runs on for 190 feet in four layers. Reading from right to left and from top to bottom, we are confronted with a sporadic flow of female nudes, from a crawling blob through a sort of she-wolf, a very pregnant woman, an emblem of fertility, piles of bodies and, finally, a pair of women peacefully strolling off into eternity. “Re-Birth of Venus,” which extends a mere 63 feet, and two smaller works are more densely populated with a historical panorama of females.

This raw-looking art deliberately mixes styles and media as if to reinforce the collective aspect of the women’s movement. The primitive and the classical, the realistic and the stylized, along with outlines, silhouettes and modeled figures mingle in a kind of narrative that has no precise story line but illustrates a dynamic surge toward liberation. No individual heroine reigns just as no historical period or aesthetic style dominates. That sounds like a democratic ticket to artistic disaster, but Spero knows how far she can go before political art becomes pure politics. (Burnett Miller Gallery, recently moved to 964 N. La Brea Ave., to July 6.)