WILSHIRE CENTER

Claire Falkenstein has been a fixture on the L.A. art scene for roughly half a century and this comprehensive survey spanning 58 years of work reveals both her strengths and weaknesses.

An exhaustingly prolific artist, Falkenstein is nothing if not energetic and she certainly isn’t afraid to try her hand in an untested medium; she paints, sculpts, sketches, casts, scratches and squeegees any surface she can get her hands on. Among the works included here: relief carvings in plexiglass, artfully cluttered collages a la Kurt Schwitters, biomorphic abstractions, glass sculptures (unfortunately lit so as to resemble lava lamps), minimally Zen pen and ink drawings, wall sculptures made of wood, rope or copper tubing, floor pieces fashioned out of rough-hewn logs and oil-on-canvas portraits.

Also on view are large photo blowups of installations done around the world, though heaven only knows when she found the time to leave her studio. The woman has clearly worked hard and shows no signs of letting up. Of 80 pieces on view, a good number of them are dated 1986.

Falkenstein has built up an uneven body of work that lacks the clarity one might find with a more focused artist. Though some of her work is aging admirably well, other pieces seem obsolete and silly. “Values,” a shaped, enamel-on-wood painting from 1945 wouldn’t look out of place in today’s hippest Lower East Side gallery, but a stainless steel sculpture suspended from the ceiling and titled “The Freeway” seems ungainly and conceptually weak. A painting from 1981, “Wrapped in Rain Storms,” looks like something one might find etched onto the wall of a cave and exudes a shimmering, mysterious power. A bit further down the wall we find “Disco,” which was painted this year. Incorporating cartoon figures in a spinning wheel of party colors, the painting clearly owes a debt to Keith Haring.

The exhibition hits its nadir in a large back room that seems like a quarter acre of Laguna’s Sawdust Festival magically transported into town. This room’s got a little bit of everything in it: large photo murals, mockups for proposed exterior sculptures, Abstract Expressionist paintings, massive wall sculptures--there’s even a tinkling fountain nestled among a bank of plants (there’s something unsettling about art that must be plugged in). Though the comprehensive scope of this show renders a valuable service to historians, some judicious editing would have presented Falkenstein in a more favorable light. She has made a sizable contribution to the local art community, but this show fails to clarify exactly what her contribution has been. (Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., to Oct. 30.)