Wilshire Center

Arik Brauer’s art is a blissful anomaly in today’s frenzied art climate. Working in jewel-toned watercolor or gouache with the most delicately precise technique imaginable, the Viennese painter concocts scenes of robust, surreal sexuality, fanciful personifications of the seasons and fairy-tale images of latter-day evil.

Bosch’s peculiar denizens of the dark congregate here, and so do Chagall’s big wistful peasants and the dreamily satisfied large-breasted women who are Brauer’s own concoction. They live in soft, dense landscapes known to the Flemish masters and rooms with unearthly, animal-limbed furniture. The remarkable purity of Brauer’s vision nearly always allows him miraculously to escape the pitfalls of cliche or pastiche.

In “Das Spiel mit dem Polster” (The Cushion Game), a nude woman with microscopic blue veins lies in bed with her arms above her head and a huge cushion ornamented with small sperm-like creatures, which she balances on one upraised foot. A breast-like protuberance rises from the bedpost. The bizarre, oddly vulnerable figure with tiny hands in “Blattbringer mit Maske” (Leaf-Bringer with Mask) wears a giant yellow Elephant Man head, a green leaf tunic and elaborately ruched blue pants. “Wo Bleiben die Menschenrechte” (Where are Human Rights?) is a pastoral lament, with a caged man, mask-heads with frozen open mouths flattened on the soil and plants that grow accusatory, open-palmed hands. Even “Kristallnacht Figur” (Crystal Night Figure) evokes the Jews’ night of horror in 1938 via quasi-mythical images: thin red trickles of blood on a wall above a cityscape, nasty Bosch-derived creatures assaulting each other on the tiered skirts of a giant figure and, in the sky, a big ball of rubble and a splintering red brick. (Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 28.)