Hollywood

In a show entitled “Los Angeles Organic Abstraction,” gallery owner Joni Gordon spreads out the canvasses of seven local painters who eschew tight geometry in favor of more biomorphic abstraction. The theme forms a much needed semantic kinship for artists whose work follows no single method or content. But what it doesn’t clarify is how this work is rooted in the L.A. experience.

Strongest is the impression that these painters are all rugged individualists. They are sorting through innumerable styles and devices and arriving at their own abstract imagery. Many of the fluid forms may be reminiscent of Jackson Pollock or Wassily Kandinsky but they have their own idiosyncratic energy. Ken Hurbert builds a single-point perspective, cartoony mix of playful forms while Jeff Price’s truncated female torso/bag is serious and disturbing. Lari Pittman and David Amico use vegetable-based forms in shallow space with widely disparate emotional force that goes another way entirely from the purist rationality of Martha Alf’s cylinder/pears. Lisa Adams’ atmospheric overpainting seems to be as much about space and atmospheres as Marc Pally’s paintings are indebted to computer-generated images and patterning.

In an accompanying essay Gordon states that the fluid forms and spatial allusions in these paintings are influenced by “Cal Tech, Disney, the Philosophical Research Society and swimming pools” (a clever way to hint at the technology, artifice, soul searching and hedonism of the local milieu). Yet what remains unclear is how these particular artists with their dissimilar approaches are a product of these local factors unless it’s their individualistic, Heinz-57 use of the abstract vocabulary. Still it’s engaging to consider the notion that the city’s sprawling isolation and cultural hodgepodge could generate its own form of rambling abstraction. (Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., to Dec. 3.)