Wilshire Center

Austrian artist Hundertwasser is a visionary jack-of-all-trades afflicted with a slight case of megalomania. A driven man who designs stamps, national flags and entire societies, the 61-year-old artist also writes manifestoes and makes his own clothes. “I sew my own clothes,” he says, “to show that life is possible without money; trousers with stitches on the outside, rabbit skin shoes, everything found in garbage bins.”

Though Hundertwasser had extensive schooling and his work has much in common with that of Paul Klee, Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, its strongest ties are to outsider art. There is a manic intensity, a barely contained hysteria to these images which, while espousing various utopian theories, churn with an undercurrent of eroticism and madness. Hundert-wasser’s vivid colors, obsessive patterning and primitive motifs--matched with his ideological naivete--place him squarely in the folk art camp.

This survey of graphic work doubles as a seminar on Hundert-wasser’s humanist ideas on ecology and global harmony. Attempting to convey the universality of man in portraiture, his images basically serve as illustrations for his charmingly simple solutions to the ills of the world. (Planting gardens on the roofs of buildings is a typical scheme.) However, despite the optimism of Hundertwasser’s ideas, his work hums with a strange vibe. Like illustrations for frightening fairy tales, his work resonates with the same vaguely menacing air that colors much European animation. Other pieces have the insipid sweetness of work by Sister Corita Kent, and look like the kind of stuff you’d find on the walls of a Montessori school.(Jack Rutberg Fine Arts Inc., 357 N. La Brea Ave., to May 13.)