Wlshire Center

Young German artist Ulrich Horndash summarizes his ideas about his work with the comment, “In order for the visual arts to survive, they must find their orientation in the concept of what is shared and public, in the hope of a fusion of art and life.” This Marxist approach to culture is hardly reflected in Horndash’s work, which is rigorously intellectual, virtually inaccessible, in fact, to anyone not privy to the complex subtexts that put his enigmatic multimedia installations into comprehensible order.

For his L.A. debut, Horndash investigates ideas surrounding the lure of spectacle and the psychology of crowds in a work titled “Dynamite.” Rooted in semiotic theory, the piece attempts to invest new meaning into the acts of collective public viewing and the altering of the physical world as exemplified in the demolition of large buildings. One wall of the gallery has been painted a rosy shade of pumpkin; mounted on the wall are five sequential photo silkscreens (printed on silk) depicting a massive, Gothic building being dynamited. The facing wall is painted a pale mint green and features a silkscreened image of a sea of transfixed faces gazing upward. A large black cross is painted on a third wall, while the fourth is hung with a pair of blue crosses (also on silk) that read as hard-edged abstractions. Pregnant with vague implications, “Dynamite” is an emotionally flat, oddly beautiful piece. The formal elegance, luxurious silks and luscious colors that Horndash favors tend to upstage the ideological cats he is attempting to skin. (Burnett Miller, 964 N. La Brea Ave., to April 29.)