La Cienega Area

When Elizabeth Murray makes a painting, it is a dynamic object that gets its kicks from being contrary. Instead of demurely adhering to a flat wall, her organic abstractions bump, fracture and bulge into space like a yeasty Frank Stella with an overactive sex drive. Her newest paintings somewhat literally twist and turn themselves inside out in a kind of biomorphic abstraction of the creative urge. Filled with shapes that read like internal organs, bodily orifices or spermatozoa, they exude an irreverent, rampant fertility.

For this exhibit Murray has again focused on the artist’s palette, transforming it into a strange biological symbol for change. “Trembling Foot,” a rolling, two-piece painting the size of a rubber life raft, pumps up the palette shape into a vegetative form complete with paint-tube shoots of new growth. “Slave” is an inflated folded palette with tentacle tubes that spew or suck at a whirling vortex dotted with comet embryo. Filled with a cartoonish, Pop sensibility, these works delight in turning art into an orgiastic fantasy.

There is, however, a somewhat ominous feeling to some of the transformation, especially in the untitled “Twist Drawings” with their labyrinths of unhealthy looking intestine. Inanimate things suddenly sprouting roots and disembodied entrails herniating into three dimensions are disturbing in their blind quest for life. It’s an edge of discomfort that even touches the exuberance of the larger paintings. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, to Jan. 14.)