ART REVIEW : ANGUISHED CRIES OF AUSTRIANS

The second installment of “Los Angeles Summer/styrian autumn,” a massive exhibition of contemporary Austrian art, has come to roost at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park (through Sept. 1), and an unruly assembly it is.

While drawings and paintings by about half the 11 artists rest politely on the walls, the remaining works dangle from the ceiling, dribble down partitions and spill out on the floor.

Stuffed fragments of bulbous, life-size figures, composing an airborne “Ball Game” by Gustav Troger, resemble a Neo-Expressionist pillow fight. Look closer and you find that the skins of their disjointed bodies are covered with paintings of other people. As the big guys bat the air, the little ones race around their torsos, legs and arms in a mad exercise of vigorous frustration.

Across the gallery, a woebegone “Cow Struck by Lightning” dominates Josef Taucher’s arresting display of rough wood sculpture. Splintered material meets shattered form in subjects taken from nature.

Another animal, Lois Weinberger’s big metal patchwork horse that’s suspended from the ceiling, rules the airspace of a multipart installation, including a flat fellow made of parallel sticks and a red-wheeled cart with a painted-log body. Nearby, Fritz Bergler’s abstract paintings turn into figurative sculpture as he combines, say, an elongated pair of stiffened fabric legs with a three-panel canvas.

With all this activity, Part II of the summer exhibition is more energetic and engaging than Part I, but unfortunately it delivers no more news from Austria.

In general, the project is a thoroughly respectable enterprise that disappoints because it simply confirms the currently homogenized state of contemporary art in the Western world.

Once that is clear, there’s nothing to do but get acquainted with the familiar-looking products of unfamiliar artists. Though the work ranges in technique, medium, style and scale, it coalesces in expressionistic fervor or despair. (My review of Part I of this show forecasted a more traditional second half, but it didn’t materialize that way.) This art is all ragged edges, nervous lines and splashy colors in the service of anguished emotion.

Norbert Nestler’s gorgeously fluid drawings, for example, depict scenes of torment, ray-gun eye contact between shadowy figures or trussed skeletons under attack. Friederike Nestler-Rebeau has fashioned exquisite clay “napkins” with wrinkles that look like loving couples in bed--a peaceful theme, but they are displayed on a ring of long-legged tables under a blazing, bare light bulb.

Even so benign a painting as Franz Motschnig’s “Shoes,” a pastel-colored canvas strewn with images of high-top tennies, acquires an ominous tone when we learn that the artist has no use of his feet. His other paintings prominently feature human skeletons amid sensitively painted textures, intricate patterns and rumpled collage.

Like the art in the first portion of the exhibition, these works seem to be authentic expressions of concern for a society run amok. There’s none of the self-promotional frenzy or bogus grief that permeates so much of America’s version of this genre.

These artists take care with their work and there’s an appealing gentleness about most of it. Unfortunately, they live in a time when exchange shows such as this one seem redundant.