ART REVIEW : ‘Artists by Artists’ at Gallery at the Plaza

How does a serious artist pose for a portrait? Is it necessary to scowl, wear spattered blue jeans, stand next to your work? “Artist’s Images: Images of Artists by Artists,” at Security Pacific’s Gallery at the Plaza in downtown Los Angeles (to March 27), offers a range of other possibilities.

Contemporary artists immortalized by their West Coast peers in more than 100 drawings, paintings, photographs and other media come across either as distinctive individuals or impregnable cultural icons.

In Don Bachardy’s able hands, realist painter Lucien Freud, with his lined, emotional face and tousled hair, looks like a great actor rising to the pitch of a key role; collage artist Alexis Smith pastes herself diffidently against her chair.

Photographers fix on a different blend of scrutiny and psychology. Douglas Metzler poses Robert Rauschenberg as if he is about to make a risque suggestion to two blank-faced nudes painted alongside him. Jack Shear catches Jim Iserman in a gawky, head-outthrust pose near a wall of his sculptures.

Blake Little creates an elegant triumvirate of forms with Peter Lodato and two large rectangular shapes familiar from his installations. Jim McHugh shows us the inscrutable side of sculptural wizard Robert Irwin, smiling with closed lips against a white background.

Nancy Webber puts a different spin on photographing artists: She searches out artists who resemble the self-portraits of famous painters, coaxes the illusion along via pose and makeup, and displays the results next to photographs of the original works of art.

Dana Escalante’s video of Kent Twitchell allows the muralist to explain how he “casts” artists as specific characters for his outdoor images and is awed at their “gifts.” A homespun, vernacular artist, Twitchell pops up with dismaying regularity in this exhibit, again with his own painting and life-size drawings of artists and, yet again, as the subject of documentary photographs by Francois Duhamel.

Wes Christensen’s tiny watercolor images zero in on enigmatic scenes that demand familiarity with lesser-known artists’ subject matter and private lives.

Robert Arneson--whose ceramic bust of sculptor Sandra Shannonhouse is stamped with biographical data, including the information that she’s his wife--concerns himself in other media with some of the big boys. A woodcut renders one of painter Francis Bacon’s eyes as a disfigured drip; bullet-headed Picasso has a piercing stare and a nest of springy chest hairs.

Kamran Moojedi works up streaks and blips of computer-generated color into portrait variants of Van Gogh and Andy Warhol. But Nick Taggart does the ultimate number on the artist-as-icon in paintings combining movie and advertising images of artists and “Artists on Film,” a stack of painted TV sets. Shows flicker dimly behind a Van Gogh painting, the artist’s image dominating a viewer’s perception of a major source of popular culture.