HOLLYWOOD

For a young painter to turn out hard-edged abstractions that are virtually identical to Agnes Martin’s work of 20 years ago seems rather perverse. It’s sort of like insisting on churning your own butter when there’s a market full of the stuff just down the street. Flying in the face of logic, Edith Bauman-Hudson defiantly waves the crisply laundered Minimalist flag despite the fact that the reductivist thinking behind the style has little to do with issues currently engaging the art world.

There is, of course, a Zen timelessness to this austere recipe, and Bauman’s interpretation--nine variations on the Venetian blind motif of horizontal stripes involving two colors--are adequately decorative. Stylishly understated though they are, they tell us little about Bauman-Hudson and nothing we don’t already know about Minimalism. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., to March 28.)