The Patty Aande Gallery (660 9th Ave.),...

The Patty Aande Gallery (660 9th Ave.), like so many other galleries during the summer months, is offering a group show.

Aande has used the occasion not to drag out tired inventory but, generally, to show new works by artists associated with the gallery. It’s an exciting show creatively selected and expertly installed by San Diego’s first and still-leading woman dealer in serious, critically regarded contemporary art. Such a show is rather like a new trend in restaurants of offering appetizer-size portions for patrons to “graze” on. Aande is offering a very full table of visual nourishment.

It is a notable feature of the Patty Aande Gallery that it is one of the few places in town that exhibits contemporary landscapes, as in a pair of diptyches by Janet Cooling of vivid, emotionally contrasting images. Eugenia Geb’s drawings of fields are darkly monochromatic and expressive.

Stephen O’Rear is a graduate student at UC San Diego; nevertheless, his large, explosive, blue abstraction on unstretched canvas epitomizes the same urgent natural force expressed by mature artists like Don Suggs of Los Angeles and Christopher Brown of the Bay Area. Astrid Preston, in contrast, conveys the luxury and the mystery of American suburban life in two representational drawings (one entitled “Brentwood Nights”) whose looseness, relative to earlier works, evinces the continuing evolution of her style. Preston does not rest on her achievements.

Gillian Theobald, another artist of great interest, also deals with mystery in landscape, but in a reductive way. There is no lushness in her paintings, no vegetation, just earth and water and sometimes fire. The ambiguity of planes in “Deep Pool” gives a peculiar charge to this spare work. “River,” a white form moving through a dark field, is a powerful example of expressionistic minimalism. It is the kind of painting that will be affective forever.

Robin Mitchell’s very strong, gaudily vertical diptyches also suggest rich landscapes.

Equally, but more subtly, visually rich are two works by Gary Ghirardi. Tall, tombstone-like forms made of concrete on plywood armatures, covered with graffiti and collaged elements, these urban monuments merit slow time and close reading.

Aande is also offering a selection of figurative works. One is so minimal and so vast in scale that you would not readily identify its reference. It is a wall-oriented sculpture of eyes and eyebrows by Amanda Farber. Diane Buckler, in contrast, shows cast-aluminum wall reliefs of cropped female torsos.

John Brodie, a brilliant colorist, is represented by sinister, fetishistic constructed drawings and Joanne Stuhr, an imaginative ceramist, by a series of constructed porcelain cups that refer to Christ’s passion.

The exhibition continues through Sept. 20.

The Knowles Gallery in La Jolla (7422 Girard Ave.) is exhibiting skillfully painted watercolors by Beverly Franklin. The most beautiful and strongest are those whose subject is water--for example, rushing streams and crashing waves. The least effective are the European urban scenes, which are superior to but still reminiscent of tourist art.

The exhibition continues through Sept. 10.