LA CIENEGA AREA

A group exhibition titled “Cityscapes” offers three distinctly different views of the urban environment. Tying these artists together is the fact that for them the spirit of a city is defined by its architecture; they also tend to find buildings--be they under construction, in situ, or halfway demolished--to be beautiful things indeed.

Faiya Fredman explores ideas concerning nature’s ability to undo man’s work in a series of mixed-media paintings of the West Coast. In “Down the Beach II” we see an oceanfront dwelling that’s been reduced--presumably by a high tide--to fragments of wood, plaster and insulation.

Richard Bunkall takes a romantic look at the New York skyline in three lush, soft-focus renderings that convert the mean streets of Manhattan into a fairy-tale city of dreams. Christian Heckscher takes a similar tack in “View Over Wilshire Center, which finds Los Angeles bathed in a magical, violet light. He finds the city to be as harmless and manageable as a toy in “Manhattan West Side,” which is painted from the point of view one might get from a towering skyscraper, and goes slightly melancholy with “View From the Cartwright Hotel”; the pink drape of a window is pulled aside to reveal rooftops, air conditioning ducts and the haunted, empty windows of an adjacent hotel made of dirty brown brick. (Ruth Bachofner, 804 N. La Cienega Blvd., to Sept. 20).