WILSHIRE CENTER

Like Rico Lebrun, with whom he shares aesthetic and biographical parallels, Hans Burkhardt is an idiosyncratic figure in Southern California art history. Both were European-born artists who moved to the West Coast from New York in the late 1930s. Both evolved a Baroque, hot-blooded style from Cubist and Surrealist models, and both came to represent provincial anachronisms outside the developing mainstream of Abstract Expressionism.

More interestingly, both painted the natural and psychological landscape of Mexico during the 1950s, and this provides the central thrust to a current exhibition of Burkhardt’s paintings of the period. Created during an era of local Philistinism, the works owe considerable debts to the New York School’s roots in 1930s biomorphism. The show’s key work in this respect is “The Burial of Gorky” (1950), an homage to Burkhardt’s mentor in which an architectural post-and-lintel structure is fused with the figurative imagery of pall bearers carrying a coffin on their shoulders. While its fragmented, almost machinelike forms hark back to Cubism, much of the iconography finds its source in Burkhardt’s early renditions of broken-stemmed flowers and bowed human heads, as well as his Crucifixion series of the 1940s.

This work foreshadows Burkhardt’s Mexican paintings. The symbolic transcendence of Gorky finds its spiritual metaphor in the Mexican Day of the Dead, with its ritualized sense of rebirth from the material horrors of ravaged corpses and open burial grounds. While Burkhardt’s abstract vocabulary rarely changes throughout the period (he borders dangerously on mannerism at times), his style gradually evolved into full-blown Expressionism, marked by kinetic brush strokes, thick impasto and a palette that could be by turns somber, earthy and vibrant. This era clearly represents the most accomplished work of Burkhardt’s career, and if some might argue that it rarely transcends its influences, it is nevertheless significant that it was created in Los Angeles at all. (Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 28.)