HOCKNEY PORTRAITS AT LOYOLA MARYMOUNT

Portraits by David Hockney will fill Loyola Marymount’s Laband Art Gallery Friday through March 14. Organized by the gallery director Ellen Ekedal, the exhibition consists of works in pen and ink, graphite and crayon, dated 1966 to 1984.

Style ranges from realistic depictions to more abstract variations; several self-portraits are included, as well as drawings of Hockney’s friend Celia, and more publicly known figures such as Cecil Beaton, Stephen Spender and Billy Wilder.

Hockney’s talents have never been confined to painting and drawing alone; he designs theater and opera sets, illustrates books and has experimented with Polariod photographs and color Xerography, creating an innovative photo/collage body of work. In fact, the catalogue for this exhibition was made by the artist on his copy machine.

Special events scheduled in conjunction with the exhibition include a slide lecture by Peter Goulds, Feb. 25 at 7:30 p.m., and a gallery tour by Ekedal, March 4 at noon.

“Adjustments,” a tribute to the work of four contemporary sculptors: Jim Love and Danny O’Dowdy from Texas, and Californians Doug Edge and the late Boyd Wright (to whom the exhibition is dedicated) opens Thursday at the Laguna Art Museum and continues through March 12.

Organized by Jim Edwards for the Nave Museum in Victoria, Tex., the four-person show focuses on common denominators. The art testifies to each artist’s concern with the human condition: Love’s fabricated steel sculptures of animals address vulnerability, Edge’s wood and bronze pieces are symbols of mythical characters expressing a plea for guidance, O’Dowdy’s objects probe enigmatic situations about people trapped in various socioeconomic binds, while Wright’s organic and fragile constructions bear testimony to poetic visions.

Another exhibition (Tuesday through March 15) showcases 40 classical drawings by Robert Baxter, a California artist whose work is described as being reminiscent of Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca.

Baxter moved to Rome in 1972 and worked there for 10 years. Women of his working-class neighborhood became subjects of his drawings and paintings, which were exhibited at the Farnesina, Italy’s national gallery, in 1982.

“Gaylen Hansen: The Paintings of a Decade, 1975 to 1985,” a traveling exhibition organized by Bruce Guenther, curator of Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum, opens Tuesday at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park. Hansen, an artist of note in the Northwest since 1957, paints intimate fictions with the purity of a child and an adult’s psychological insights.

In his catalogue essay, Guenther states: “Central to Hansen’s paintings of the past 10 years has been a character known as ‘The Kernal,’ a western Everyman whose uncanny resemblance to the artist is more than accidental. . . . He is the embodiment of the Old West mystique, an outdoorsman whose exploits in the wilds are filled with animals of gigantic proportions and wildly improbable twists of fate. . . . Through “The Kernal,” Hansen, an inveterate storyteller, melds nature, anecdote and disparate formal sources--art history, folk art and popular culture--to create a mythology of place.”

A second exhibition, “Two From L.A.,” presents paintings by Nancy Jackson and Dane Wilson, two young Los Angeles artists whose works share an attitude of wondrous innocence. Just prior to the opening reception, Tuesday at 4:30 p.m., Hansen will be at the gallery for a public question-and-answer session.

“Frames of Time and Context: The Development of Photographic Ideas” presents about 90 works by Stephen Berens, Eileen Cowin, Joe Deal, Susan Felter, Robbert Flick, Tamara Kaida, Susan Rankaitis and Jeff Weiss at Security Pacific’s downtown Gallery at the Plaza, Monday through March 29.

The exhibition was organized by guest curator Mark Johnstone to demonstrate the evolution of each artist’s creativity through a given period of time.

In a written statement, gallery director Tressa Miller explains, “A presentation such as this gives us an opportunity to look with a certain depth at the individual motivations for producing fine art photography.”

“Modern Times,” the final installment of the four-part exhibition, “The Work of Atget,” is on view at the University Art Museum, UC Berkeley, through March 15.

The show, organized by John Szarkowsky of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, contains 117 photographs taken by Eugene Atget between 1898 to 1927. The images present his view of Paris as it moved into the 20th Century.

Atget (1857-1927) was a commercial photographer whose main interest lay in documenting the historical panorama of 19th- and 20th-Century France.