Wilshire Center

With a museum list that reads like a world atlas and works in seminal shows like the Museum of Modern Art’s “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,” Hubert Schmalix is no newcomer. He recently moved from Austria to Los Angeles and is exhibiting three works done since his arrival here.

The catalogue pits each painting against bizarre excerpts from the writings of Kafka, Goethe, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. The works themselves reflect the writer’s ability to drape the commonplace in portent. Schmalix’s figuration has a simple rough candor--physical and emotional--but it is not German Expressionism. This doesn’t mean that he skimps on the angst. Besides a couple of happy yet eerie landscapes, Schmalix’s favorite format is to wrap crudely rendered female nudes, their legs too spindly for squat torsos, in huge expanses of biting abstract color.

In “Green Grass,” a stark nude holds her anguished face while carefully calibrated fields of green and blue appear to shackle her. In “Lost,” a minute nude seems to fight her way through a mottled space attempting to get to a border of autumnal color that suggests garden foliage. “F on Red” sits most comfortable on the edge of pure painterly panache and existential storyline. (Turske & Whitney Gallery, 962 N. La Brea Ave., to Oct. 25.)